


The Hornets' Nest

by nazlan



Series: Berlin 2054 [1]
Category: Shadowrun, Shadowrun: Dragonfall
Genre: Cyberpunk, F/M, Friendship, Gen, Late Night Conversations, Punk, Shadowrun - Freeform, Unconventional Relationship, never cut a deal with a dragon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-28
Updated: 2018-04-23
Packaged: 2019-01-06 13:56:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 38,956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12212640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nazlan/pseuds/nazlan
Summary: Real friends, real trust, real love – those are hard things to come by in the shadows. When you find them, if you're smart, you fight for them.





	1. Prost

We got drunk the night Monika died, Dietrich and I. Glory had vanished, ghost-like, into the depths of the safehouse. Paul had retreated to his office in the store front, shock still playing over his face at odd moments. And Eiger had fixed me with one last glare of pure loathing before shrugging on her coat and pointedly vacating the building. So that left me and Dietrich and his bottle of really, _really_ good schnapps. “You’ll like Dietrich,” Monika had said. “He’s the best.” And even though we’d been acquainted for the month I’d been in Berlin, I felt like I was finally, truly meeting him for the first time that night. I said as much after a pull off the bottle, and he grinned.

“That’s the magic of the good shit, _mein Liebling_.”

“And watching your best friend’s brain fry?” Apparently the good shit was sending me to a morose place. Or I’d never left. His smile faded.

“If that doesn’t bring people together, I don’t know what can.” He took another drink. “Thank you, by the way. I was a little afraid I’d be drinking alone tonight. Wouldn’t be the first time, but I’d rather not.”

I took back the bottle from him. “No…tonight’s not a good night for drinking alone.”

“Glad we agree.” He leaned back on the couch, fixing me with a curious look. “What brought you to Berlin, Zee? Really?”

When I’d come to Berlin and met Monika’s crew, there’d been the standard shadowrunner half-truths, the polite vagueness that could be expanded or contracted as needed. That’s SOP in the shadows and everyone understands. Monika had known it all, of course, and that had been enough. I squeezed my eyes shut to keep the image of her seizing helplessly on the cold floor from reappearing. Another drink helped.

“A fresh start,” I said softly. “Things were good for a while. Then they weren’t. Just when I thought I’d run out of chips to cash, there she was.”

“Hand outstretched, like a ministering angel.” He chuckled. “She was good at saving people. Had an instinct for it. So of course she had to showboat a little at it. She was good at that, too.”

“And what about you? What’d she save you from?”

“Getting old. I wasn’t ready for the pasture yet.”

I cocked a skeptical eyebrow at him. He was what, 45, 46? Old for a shadowrunner, but only because we have such a damn short life expectancy. In the daylight world, he’d be barely middle-aged. “If you say so. You certainly keep up your end on the job.”

He rubbed his bald head, partially obscuring the tattoos that covered it. “The Dragonslayer isn’t done with me yet. When I thought I was out of outlets, I met Monika.” 

“Outlets for what?”

“I have to do His work. And He kicks the hornets’ nest. ‘Cause there’s always a fight, always rot to be torn out. He tells the powerful to watch their backs. He says fuck authority.”

I laughed. Shamans tend to get excited when talking about their totems, but his eyes practically glowed. “Sounds like the Dragonslayer would like the Sex Pistols.”

His chest swelled. “You are a woman after my own heart, Zee. Someone your age, who actually knows to name-check the Sex Pistols?”

“I’m not a complete cultural illiterate,” I said, sticking out my tongue. I realized I was starting to feel a little tipsy, and it was a good feeling. “I happen to know a lot about 20th Century music. Ask me about French synth-pop.”

The look on his face, an expression of dubious distaste, made me giggle. “Do I have to?”

“Oh fine. Anyway, I think you’ve gotten so used to being the oldest guy in the room that it’s skewed your perceptions.”

“Yeah, probably.” He smiled, a bit wistfully. “Monika knew, though. She knew just what I needed to feel relevant, and I think she knew what you needed, too. If you were looking for a place to land, you’ve found it. And I think you’ll fit in here, hand in glove.” He raised the bottle for the fifth time that night. “To Monika!”

“Prost!” I answered.

We got drunk that night, and fell asleep on the battered, squashy couch in the safe house common area. I woke up suddenly, hours later. Everything was still, quiet and dark. I had no way to judge what time it was. My mouth was dry, my eyes drier, and it took a moment to take stock of my surroundings and situation. We’d fall asleep on each other, after a fashion, and his left arm was around my shoulders. I had to laugh, just a little. What a couple of sloppy drunks. I shifted to disentangle from him. In the process, his hand brushed my breast, and for a half-second – less than that, even – reality shifted.

In that lightning flash of time, I saw his eyes open, felt him cup my breast, felt his mouth press to mine. There was nothing strange or surprising or unwanted about it. It must have happened a thousand times before. I moaned delight, enthusiasm, desire against his lips as he rolled me gently under him on the couch, the sensation of his weight bearing against me a pleasure I had surely known and enjoyed before. In that instant, it was _real_ , it happened, it HAD happened, and then it was over, and he was asleep, snoring lightly beside me. I shook my head. “What the hell?” His only reply was another snore. I stood shakily, and staggered off to take a _very_ cold shower.

The next day, hangovers were nursed and plans were made. We had a line on the contact that had sent us to Harfeld Manor and to Monika’s death, and we would have answers. And a strange drunken dream/vision/whatever, born out of alcohol and grief was, in the light of our new task, barely worth mentioning. So I didn’t. I was sure it didn’t mean anything.


	2. A Long Drag

I don’t have a lot of vices – I don’t do Bliss or Jazz and definitely give BTLs or sim-senses a wide berth. But there’s one that always manages to keep a claw in me, though I was proud of myself for keeping it together as long as I did. 

We departed Das Kesselhaus with a few precious answers, a whole new container ship of questions, and the new guy. Blitz, he called himself. We returned, briefed Paul, devised a plan, got Blitz settled – and then I fled, out into the chilly night where a cigarette could keep me company. I took a long drag, hoping the nicotine and the ritual would ease my shattered nerves.  


I couldn’t get it out of my head. Just when I could close my eyes and NOT see Monika dead on the floor, we’d found Green Winters, hopelessly contorted in his last agony. My hand shook bringing the cig to my lips, and I knew it wasn’t just cold that made it tremble. Night in the Kreuzbasar was quiet, peaceful, but the inside of my head was anything but.

“There you are.” 

I jumped, furious at myself that I was so up my own ass I’d failed to notice Dietrich’s approach. He eyed my cigarette reproachfully. “Those things will kill you, you know.”

“Says the man with the never-ending flask,” I retorted. To my irritation, he just smiled good-naturedly.

“My liver’s indestructible. Besides, that’s not what gets me in the end anyway.” 

“What does?”

He shrugged. “Kickin’ the hornets’ nest. One of these days I’ll get stung too hard. That’s Dragonslayer’s promise and price.”

“And you’re okay with that?”

“We all go eventually. Blaze of glory’s the best way, if you ask me.”

“Better to burn out than fade away?” I asked, ashing my cig. He nodded.

“Exactly.” He hugged himself close. “What are you doing out here, Zee?”

“Needed some air.” The tip of the cigarette glowed hot as I inhaled. “That’s all.”

“Uh-huh.” He didn’t seem to believe me.

“I-” He was looking at me, his eyes fixed on a spot right between and just above my eyebrows. Dammit, he was looking at my aura, wasn’t he? Fucking shamans. I sighed heavily. “I’m scared, Dietrich. Okay?”

His gaze flickered from my third eye to the two physical ones. “Of what?”

Suddenly I couldn’t look at him. I rubbed at my datajack, staring miserably at the pavement. “I’ve had this thing for a decade,” I whispered. “I’ve never been afraid to jack in before but now-” I swallowed. “Promise me something, Dietrich.”

“Of course.”

“If what happened to Monika, and Green Winters, if it happens to me…Promise me you’ll do for me what you did for her.”

“I don’t understand. I couldn’t do anything for her…”

“You held her down.” When the seizure began, he’d flung himself over her, protecting her from the worst of the convulsions. There’d been nothing any of us could do to save her brain, but at least she hadn’t broken her back. “I think she knew,” I murmured. “I think she knew you were there and it gave her comfort.” 

“I hope so,” he said quietly. “Look, Zee, obviously the Matrix isn’t my forte, and I don’t know what exactly killed Monika and Green Winters, but…if it’ll help, I promise.”

“Thank you.” I stubbed out the cigarette, still seeing Monika, somewhere in the middle distance. I hoped I was right too, that somewhere in the midst of that godawful feedback coursing through her nervous system, she’d felt Dietrich’s weight and known she wasn’t alone. Hell, maybe that thought, scrambled with booze and fear, had been what prompted that weird semi-sex dream of a few nights before. 

“Any time, love.” The way he dropped that English word into the sentence made me chuckle for some reason.

“You sound like an Englishman.”

He grinned. “Why thank you. Actually spent a while in London, back in the ‘30s. Learned just enough English slang to be really annoying.”

“What were you doing there? Were you already a shadowrunner?” I was about to be tremendously impressed. A twenty plus year shadowrunning career? That was a hell of a thing. He disabused that notion with a shake of his head.

“Nah, running came later. That was when I was with my band.”

“Your what?”

“My band. Once upon a time, I fronted a punk group. And I bet even you never heard of it, Fräulein Music Trivia.”

“Try me.”

“We were called MESSERKAMPF!”

It was all in capitals, I could tell, and I was positive I’d heard an exclamation point. “Knife Fight?”

“Told you we weren’t exactly a big deal.”

I leaned back against the wall, feeling myself smile, even though I wouldn’t have thought myself capable of it just fifteen minutes before. “So you were the front man for a punk group.”

“Is that so hard to believe?”

“Actually…no. Not at all.” It explained a lot, honestly. And suddenly I could see it, could see him. Roaring into a microphone over the scream of guitars, the air alive with the energy of the crowd in that symbiotic circle of performer and audience. I shook my head wonderingly. “You must have gotten so many panties thrown at you.”

His lips quirked. "Yeah, something like that." I suddenly felt very naive, and his smile grew deeper. "But I don’t like to brag,” he said, all modesty. I laughed.

“I’m sure you don’t.”

He propped himself on the wall next to me, gazing upward. “But that’s all ancient history. Left that behind a long time ago. Better to focus on the here and now, right?”

“I guess so.” I cast him a sideways glance. “Thank you, Dietrich. I needed that.”

“Needed what?”

“Something to smile about.”

“Better for you than those cancer sticks.”

“Says the man with the supposedly indestructible liver.”


	3. The Replacement

They say eavesdroppers rarely hear well of themselves, and that’s true. Knowing that didn’t stop me from pausing when I heard Eiger say my name, though. I stopped short, Dante almost running me over in the process. Monika’s big brown mutt had taken to following me everywhere lately, and I held out a hand to hush him.

“I don’t care how well she handled herself at Harfeld! Or that rat-trap hotel! I want to know why you keep acting like everything is fine and normal!”

They were in the kitchen of the common area. I could hear dishes being handled, and then, Dietrich’s voice.

“And I’d like to know why you keep insisting on scanning her for flaws like you’ve got an electron microscope.” His tone was steady and mild, but Eiger huffed like he’d flipped her off. Maybe he had. He’s a complicated guy.

“She can’t replace Monika,” Eiger said flatly.

“Monika vouched for her.”

“As an addition to the team, not as its leader. You can’t just swap in one decker for another, like interchangeable parts. That’s like saying that Blitz idiot could take her place.”

“Blitz is...well, he’s a fuck-up, but Zee seems to be able to handle him.”

“Let’s all drop to our knees and thank fuck for that,” she muttered acidly.

Interchangeable parts. Had that been Monika’s plan? In our younger days, we’d joked we were twins – the joke being that of course we weren’t; her the tall, statuesque Aryan _wunder Mädchen_ and me short and undeniably Asian. It had been for her sake that I started going by Zee, when her valiant efforts to wrap her tongue around my aggressively Chinese given name had failed. (At least she’d tried – all of my childhood and adolescence I’d been Chrissi, the better to prevent German discomfort) But we’d gotten our datajacks the same day, and sometimes, cruising the Matrix, we could settle into a groove of such synchronicity it was almost a little frightening. Then she’d gotten into politics, falling hard for the ideals of the Flux State, and I’d tried my hand at corp security, and we’d drifted apart. Looking back, I probably should have followed her. I wasn’t sure now why I hadn’t. Maybe I’d been scared being in her shadow. Funny how I longed for it now.

Dietrich and Eiger were still talking. “Is there a point to this, Eiger love?”

“I see what’s going on. Glory and Amsel have bought in, even that damn dog, and you-”

“What about me?”

Silence for a moment, then she said in a heated tone, “I saw you two. The night Monika died. I came back and you were all over each other on the couch.” Her voice lowered. “You always wanted Monika. And that never happened. So now you’re trying your luck with the replacement. Maybe she’ll let you get your dick wet.”

“You’ve never cared about my dick before, Eiger,” he said evenly. “Why start now?”

He handled that so much better than I would have. She must have been trying to provoke him, because with that, she stomped out, and a troll who’s well over two meters tall does not stomp quietly. I leaned against the wall, trying to school my face for casualness, waited a twenty count and then walked in. Dante followed, looking as nonchalant as a mastiff/Clydesdale hybrid possibly could.

“Sorry you had to hear that,” Dietrich said, setting a mug in the sink. Either my casual face had completely failed me, or he was looking at my treacherous aura again.

“Yeah, well…” Suddenly, inexplicably, I had to know. “You and Monika…?”

He shrugged, a little smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “Everybody was a little in love with her. You know how she was.”

I did. She had been effortlessly charismatic, and hot as hell to boot. I’m pretty firmly heterosexual, but I probably would have hit that under the right circumstances, just to try. But as for the rest of Eiger’s accusation…

I was saved from having to figure out if/how to address it when Paul Amsel walked in. “Zee,” he said, “do you have a moment?”

“Of course.”

Dietrich excused himself, and Amsel and I sat. “I’ve been going over the information you obtained from Das Kesselhaus,” he said. He removed his glasses, pinching the bridge of his nose. “We’re in deep waters here, Zee.” I nodded. “Do you want to pursue this?”

My first reaction was to protest I wasn’t the person to ask, but then…I was, wasn’t I? Amsel added, “If the Firewing still lives, we are going up against the machinations of a Great Dragon, and that’s not something to be done lightly.”

“No,” I said. “It isn’t.” Feuerschwinge had devastated Germany the first time around, now it seemed she’d learned the more subtle ways of her kin. Who could say what havoc she could wreak, and how many lives would be lost in the process? One already had been. Monika Schäfer, and that was quite enough for me. Real friends, real trust, real love – those are hard things to come by in the shadows. When you found them, if you were smart, you fought for them. “Dragonslayer kicks the hornets’ nest,” I murmured.

“What was that?”

“I think we have to see this through, Paul,” I said. “Because if we don’t, who will?”

A very small smile crossed his careworn face. “Sounds like the sort of thing Monika would say,” he said softly. _Everybody was a little in love with her_ , I thought. “All right. But I must warn you this goes beyond the abilities of my network. We will have to seek out much better connected information brokers. Which means the price will be much higher.”

I took a deep breath. This at least I knew how to handle. “Making money is what we do. You make the arrangements, we’ll figure out the financing.”


	4. Family

Samuel Beckenbauer asked me to meet at Cafe Cezve, and of course I said yes. The biggest and strangest realization in the wake of Monika’s death had been that I hadn’t just inherited a team of shadowrunners from her, I’d inherited a whole damn kiez. My Monika, friend of my misspent youth, had been a power player, an influencer, a mover and shaker in the Flux State. Everyone I’d talked to had no doubt she’d been the glue that held the Kreuzbasar together, and that statement had come with looks of pity for me and worry for them. But just as quickly as the paralyzing fear of failure rushed over me, I saw the truth of it: It wasn’t so much that Monika had single-handedly made her kiez safe and stable. Rather, her presence had given the people of the Kreuzbasar permission to make _themselves_ safe and stable, and she’d done it so effectively, they hadn’t even realized it.

I’d always known she was a genius. I just hadn’t known the scale.

Samuel shifted in his big chair (Altuğ thoughtfully furnished his café with seating that accommodated the wide morphological variety of the Kreuzbasar’s population – either that, or he just took what he could find and called it a day). He sipped uncomfortably at his soykaf, and I realized he probably didn’t do this sort of thing often. He was a good upstanding citizen, after all. He placed a tablet on the table between us and toggled on the screen. 

“Humanis Policlub,” I read, and curled my lip. “Oh, they’re some of those ‘humans first’ clowns, aren’t they?”

Samuel nodded, taking another drink. The cup clinked softly against his tusks. “I’m afraid I can’t just dismiss them as ‘clowns’ unfortunately.” His voice was very deep and very soft. “I have contacts who monitor hate groups like this. They’ve recently provided me with distressing information.”

He tapped the tablet, pulling up a message. I scanned it, and my blood went cold. “What are they planning to do with a stockpile of chemicals like this?”

“We don’t know. That’s why I wanted to hire you. Whatever the plan is, it can’t be good. They must be stopped.”

Shadowrunning is an ethically and morally ambiguous line of work. It’s so rare to find good, clear-cut cases of right and wrong. And to get paid for it? Even better. “Of course, Samuel. Tell me everything I need to know.”

Glory was waiting for me when I got back to the safehouse, standing near the door in that motionless, wraith-like way of hers. To call her unsettling would be unkind, and there’s something about her that inspires kindness, or at least the desire to be kind. She’s small and beautiful and delicate, with her pale, perfect skin and dark, dark eyes. Which makes her bulky cyberware all the more incongruous. Those arms must have meant for an orc. And there was the blank, empty expression that was the default for a face that seemed like it should have been alive with emotion. “What is the deal with Glory?” I’d asked Monika, breaking the cardinal rule. And she’d looked pained and said, “Your guess is as good as mine. I figure when she’s ready, we’ll find out. But it’s not my place. It’s _really_ not my place.” So Glory got all the time and space she needed, and I hoped that someday, she would make sense.

“Dietrich is looking for you,” Glory said. “He’s a bit agitated.”

“Anything serious?” I asked cautiously.

“I don’t know. He didn’t say.” And then she was gone. You wouldn’t think someone with that much chrome could be so quiet.

I found Dietrich just outside the armory. Glory had been right, though ‘a bit agitated’ was an understatement. He was practically vibrating. He rocked on the balls of his feet, eyes intense. “Did you talk to Samuel?”

“Yes…Dietrich, is everything okay?”

“Did you say we’d do it?”

I peered at him. “I did.”

“Good, good.” He was rolling his fingers, clenching and unclenching his fists. 

“Dietrich,” I repeated slowly, “is everything okay?”

“Those racist fucks!” he burst out. “We have such short fucking memories!”

I couldn’t pretend to know where he was going with this, so I decided not to get in his way.

“Fifteen years,” he continued, shaking his head. “It’s only been fifteen years, and they come crawling back like roaches.” He rubbed his head with both hands. I felt like I was getting an inkling.

“The Night of Rage was fifteen years ago, right?”

“Yeah.” He glanced at me sidelong. “You were what, five?”

“I was eleven, Dietrich,” I said tartly. My main memory of the Night of Rage was watching news reports in our darkened living room, an eerie silence settled over the neighborhood, punctured occasionally by distant sirens. But we’d lived in a little corporate town on the edge of the RuhrPlex. I knew Berlin had been a very different story. I said so, and he barked a hard-edged laugh.

“That’s one way to put it, love.” His face grew distant. “We fought back. The punks and the anarchists and the gutter-trash. Those fascist, murdering hatemongers tried to come for this city and we fought back.” His eyes, normally a clear brown, seemed to go slightly golden green, and when he looked at me, the streets of Berlin were aflame. And there was Dietrich, younger and with fewer tattoos, at the head of a phalanx of combat-booted misfits, armed with whatever they had laid their hands on. A small body (God, it must have been a child) swung limply from a lamppost, and with a howl, Dietrich and his followers descended on the gathered lynch mob. I swear I could smell the blood and the smoke, and I blinked hard, shaking my head. “Sorry about that,” he said. His eyes were normal again. 

“Did you do that?” I rubbed my eyes.

“Not exactly. It’s more like the Dragonslayer does it through me. Not everyone’s receptive to it.” He tilted his head. "Are you Awakened?”

“Me?” I snorted. “Hardly.” My knowledge of magic extends roughly to I know it exists. Besides, everyone knows that magic and cyberware don’t mix, and while I might not be quite as chromed up as some deckers, I’ve had some work done. He looked intrigued, and for some reason, I felt awkward under his scrutiny. I changed the subject back to work. “So obviously you’re not a fan of Humanis’s worldview. That’s why you’re glad we’re taking this run?”

“Well...” He rubbed his head again. This time it almost looked like embarrassment. “There’s...another factor.” He sighed. “My brother and I grew up rough. Not a lot of money, not a lot of anything. But I found the Dragonslayer and fighting the good fight, and he found...nothing. Nothing but anger and resentment. No problems his fists couldn’t solve. And nothing was ever his fault. He’s a real piece of shit, honestly, and I’d be perfectly happy to forget we ever came out of the same uterus except that the fucker reproduced. And his son, Alexander...is a good kid. I haven’t done as much as I could have for that boy. I regret that.

“The leadership of groups like Humanis, they take vulnerable, lost kids, kids who just need something to believe in, and they fill their heads with that racist drek and tell them they have a family now!” He dropped his eyes, shame drifting across his face. “He had a family. One that let him down.”

It all made sense now. “You think your nephew’s joined Humanis?”

“I know he has. Humanis feeds and houses their recruits. It’s like a fucking boarding school for racists. And anything my asshole brother doesn’t have to spend on his own damn kid…” He looked at me, desperation in his eyes. I suddenly wanted to give him a hug. “I have to try to get him out, Zee. I owe him that much.”

The thing about Dietrich is that he pulls focus, whenever he’s in a room. You can’t _not_ look at him. Lots of shamans are like that. It goes with the power they get from their totems. And maybe he isn’t handsome in the classical sense, but with those warm eyes and that mobile mouth (and a body he obviously had not neglected, never-ending flask or not), well, the bit about thrown panties had not been entirely a joke on my part. But more than that, he’s funny, and warm, and gregarious. And seeing him so serious, seeing him _need_ … honestly, he could have asked me just about anything, and with that look on his face, I would have said yes. I wonder if he knew that. “Okay, Dietrich. Whatever we can do.”

And then he smiled gratefully, and I would have done anything for that face too. “Thank you.”


	5. Dragonslayer's Favor

The appropriate reaction, 99 times out of 100, to things going too smoothly on a job is to wonder when the other shoe is going to drop. A healthy level of pessimism never got anyone killed. And after how spectacularly things had gone wrong at Harfeld, one could hardly blame us for being twitchy. But oddly, I think we were mostly relieved. We’d needed a win.

The plan was straightforward. We’d posed as ‘additional security’ for the smugglers bringing the order of chemicals, then broken into the Humanis HQ upon arrival. Our job was to find out what the plan was for those chemicals, and to collect any information the metahuman network could use to ruin these drekheads. It had also been made clear that if we broke anything or anyone in the course of the run, well, these things happen.

Blitz and I gleefully cleared their servers of every even remotely interesting file, while Glory and Dietrich kept watch. As I jacked out, I heard Glory say, “This is revolting.” She was narrowly examining a poster on the wall that depicted a pair of orks leering grotesquely over a cowering human woman. She shook her head. “Fear makes people believe such terrible things.” She almost sounded sad.

Dietrich paced around the room unhappily. Of all the goals of this run, his was going the most poorly. The Humanis compound was empty, with no sign of Alexander, save a label on a bunk reading ‘A. Farber’. (And that was how I learned Dietrich’s surname.) “Think I’m done here, chief,” Blitz said, jacking out. “Found it.” He zipped his findings over to my PDA and I couldn’t help but whistle. 

Supposedly the combination of chemicals, released as an aerosol, would trigger an amygdala reaction in metahumans, provoking violence. And if all went according to plan, the previously tolerant(ish) human population of Berlin would turn on the monsters in their midst, seeing them for what they really were, and there would be Humanis, ready to lead the charge. Dietrich read over my shoulder, and I could tell when he’d reached the end because the air around him seemed to get hotter.

“Can I burn this fucking place to the ground, boss?” he growled. 

“That’s a very tempting thought,” I replied, “but maybe we should wait until we get outside.” He nodded, the temperature lowering back to normal, and I was about to apologize for our failure on the Alexander front when Eiger’s voice crackled over our comms.

“Hostiles inbound,” she said in clipped tones. “I’m seeing a dozen. And it looks like Stahl’s with them.”

Volker Stahl. The ringleader of this nasty little circus. “Any chance we can avoid them?” I asked, but my heart wasn’t really in the question. The whole point of shadowrunning is not to be seen, but a little punk justice sounded very appealing. This bunch could use a good old-fashioned curb-stomping. I was honestly relieved at her reply.

“Negative. Best you can do is meet them outside where I can provide cover fire.”

“Blitz, you still have two drones out there too, right?”

“Sure do,” he said cheerfully, stowing his deck and pulling out his control comm.

“Eiger, I think we’ll be fine. See you outside.”

We made it out just as Stahl and his bandana-ed goon squad reached the courtyard, weapons ready. “I should have known you weren’t just making a delivery,” he said, feigning disappointment. He had the unctuous, nasty air of a man who is firmly convinced the vile things he believes are a rational reaction to the world around him. I shrugged.

“Yeah, you should have, Volker. If you really thought nobody was going to try to stop you, you’re crazier than I thought.”

“Oh, I knew someone would try to stop us. There are always those who stand in the way of history. I just didn’t think it would be…” He made great show of looking me up and down. “Someone like you.”

“Oh please.” I rolled my eyes. “Today it’s metahumans. Fifty years ago it was the Turks. Before that, it was the Roma and the Jews and people who looked like me. The hate never changes. Just the target.”

The mask dropped. “Spoken like a true race traitor,” he spat.

“That’s me,” I said brightly. “Thinkin’ about getting a tee shirt made up.”

One of the henchmen fidgeted uncomfortably. There was something familiar about his eyes. I glanced sidelong at Dietrich, and realized why.

“Alex?”

The kid shifted, his bandana slipping to reveal his face. With that jawline, there was no way he wasn’t related to Dietrich. “Uncle Dietrich, what are you doing here?” he muttered, his cheeks hot.

“Uncle Dietrich?” Stahl looked amused. “Farber, if you’ve got this kind of trash in the family, no wonder you came to us.” I felt as much as saw Dietrich suck in an enraged breath, one that would probably end with Stahl taking either a knife or a lightning bolt to the face, but I didn’t have to intervene, because he exhaled, and pointedly spoke directly to his nephew. 

"Alex, you don’t have to stay here. You can come with us.”

“Why?” the kid hissed. “What have you ever done for me?”

“Not enough. Let me make up for that. I know I can’t give you back the time my shithead brother took from you, but I can least make sure it’s better from here on out.” The muzzle of Alexander’s gun wavered.

“Whose side are you on, Alexander?” Stahl asked, in a low, flat voice. "You were nothing before you came to us. Nothing! Do you really want to go back to that?"

"I-"

"You can crawl away like a coward, or you can keep your word and stand up like a man. You took an oath.”

“Do what you have to, Alex,” Dietrich said softly, never taking his eyes off his nephew’s face. "It's your call. Your choice."

“I have a shot,” Eiger said in my ear. I looked at Alexander, his gaze flickering between Stahl and Dietrich. His weapon steadied - he'd made his choice, and I made mine.

“Take it,” I said.

Everything happened all at once.

I know that’s a cliché, but it’s true. Eiger took her shot, Volker Stahl’s head disappeared in a cloud of blood and brain, Blitz toggled his hidden drones back to active mode, Glory extended her hand razors with a pneumatic hiss and gave that little neck twitch that meant she’d activated her adrenal pump, and Alexander and Dietrich Farber stared each other down along the barrel of Alex’s gun. One of the other Humanis members raised his weapon, the laser sight dancing across Dietrich’s chest. Alex pivoted on his heel, squeezing off a quick shot. Dietrich looked grateful, but before he could say anything, his nephew was covering him again. “We can’t talk if you get shot, okay?” Dietrich grinned broadly and threw himself into the fight.

It was over quickly. Stahl may have thought his crew were true believers, but the sight of his skull vanishing seemed to have cured most of them of that. Alexander stood rigid, weapon still shouldered, long after the last of his erstwhile companions had fled. Glory put a hand on its barrel. “You can drop that now,” she said gently. She still had her razors out, though. He gulped, then gulped harder as Eiger emerged from her sniper’s nest, her long rifle slung loosely over her shoulder.

“We done here?” she asked me professionally. I nodded. Dietrich put his arm around his nephew’s shoulders.

“We should have that talk now, kid.”

We gave them space on the U-Bahn ride home. It was a long talk, and obviously got heated at a couple of points, which we all ignored. Shadowrunners don’t put their noses where they aren’t invited. When we got back to the Kreuzbasar, we all dispersed to our own business. I saw Dietrich and Alexander sit together on a bench near the station entrance. Alexander looked lost, and I felt for him. He’d had his whole world upended in one night, and even if it had been a shitty world, it was still all he’d known. So even though shadowrunners don’t put their noses where they aren’t invited, I paused as I passed them, and said, “Look, Alexander…I know you don’t know me or anything about me, but your uncle’s a good man, and you did the right thing tonight.” 

He glanced up, barely seeming to notice me. “Yeah…um, thanks.” Dietrich smiled at me, and reached out to catch my hand. Though he was sitting on a concrete bench, I felt a small shock, like static electricity. His hand was warm, and the warmth seemed to travel up my arm. I gave it a quick squeeze, and left. This was family business, and I didn’t want to overstay my welcome.

I settled up with Samuel, who was profusely grateful. That made a nice change, because most clients treat the end of a run like scraping something unpleasant off their shoe. I went back to the safehouse, updated Paul, cleaned my gear, ran some diagnostics on my deck, and watched some trid with Blitz and Glory until Dante whined for the door. “Alright, boy, let’s go.” I pulled on my jacket, and we headed out into the wee small hours of the Kreuzbasar morning. 

We made a long loop of the west side of the kiez, enjoying the cool, quiet night. On our way back, we ran into Dietrich. “Where’s Alexander?” I asked.

“He’s at Samuel’s. He’s going to be staying there for a while.”

I squinted at him in confusion. “I thought Samuel’s shelter was only for non-humans.”

“It is. That’s why he’s there. It’ll be good for him.”

I had to smile at that. “Tough love, Uncle Dietrich style.”

“Nah,” he said, smiling back. “He just needs his horizons broadened some. And I didn’t force him to do it. He agreed to.” He scratched Dante’s ears. “I wanted to thank you, Zee,” he added, quietly. “Even though I don’t think I can thank you enough.”

“Null sheen, love.” I tried out the English endearment, and was pleased by his approving chuckle. “It’s not a big deal.”

“Yeah, it is.” His face grew still, and he took my hand again, palm against palm, his fingers bent over mine. Again I felt the static spark and the warmth. “Do you feel that?” I nodded. “Dragonslayer is pleased, _Liebchen_. I don’t know what I’ll be able to do with this power, but we did good tonight, and He’s rewarding me.” A dim glow gathered on the pavement at his feet, resolving itself into a luminous mandala beneath him. I stared. 

“Is that coming from you?” I whispered. He broke into a huge grin.

“Pretty cool, huh? I'll be able do something with this soon, and it'll be good, I know it.”

“That’s awesome, but, Dietrich… I didn’t do this for your idol. I did it for you.”

Sometimes we say honest things carefully, because honesty is a blunt weapon and must be wielded carefully. That had not been the careful kind of honesty. Dietrich blinked, like I’d surprised him. I’d sort of surprised myself. We stood there, hands clasped, eyes locked. The world was silent and lit by the glow of Dragonslayer’s favor. Honesty hung in the air between us, but it had run out of words.

He had beautiful eyes.

The light of the mandala faded, and reality reasserted itself. Dante nudged my leg with his massive head, and I cleared my throat. “Getting chilly,” I said.

“Yeah. We should go to bed. To sleep,” he clarified.

“Yeah.”

We put our hands in our respective pockets, and went to our respective beds.


	6. Professional

“We’re walking,” Eiger announced, looming suddenly over my workbench. She’s a very effective loomer, so I followed her out of the safehouse, curious but wary.

I waited for her to start talking, and truthfully, it took most of my concentration just to keep up with her. I’m short for a human and she’s tall for a troll, so I was practically having to jog beside her. “It’ll take Eiger a while to warm up to you,” Monika had said. “Newbies make her itch. But she’s a pro. Treat her like one, don’t kiss her ass, and you’ll be fine.” And that advice probably would have been more than enough – if Monika hadn’t died, and Eiger, in her grief, hadn’t placed the blame for that death squarely on my shoulders. She’d made it clear that we could work together (because she was a pro), but I shouldn’t expect anything more from her. So I didn’t. If the room got cooler every time Eiger walked in, I’d just have to put on a sweater.

Finally, she stopped near the tree across from Der Weinkeller bar and looked down at me. “I owe you an apology.”

Oh. Okay then.

“You handle yourself well in the field, your tactical decisions are sound, and you have good instincts regarding the strengths and weaknesses of the team. I should not have been so hard on you, and I apologize.”

“Well, uh...thank you. Apology accepted. I hope things can be a bit smoother between us now.”

She nodded curtly, and I wondered if that was it. We stood in awkward silence for a moment, then she sat heavily on the retaining wall and said, so softly I almost didn’t hear her, “I know it’s not your fault Monika died.”

I leaned against the wall, watching her face, waiting for her to look my way again. “Seeing how Green Winters died...there wasn’t anything you or anyone else could have done for her. That wasn’t just bio-feedback, it was…” Her voice trailed off, eyes unfocused. She was probably seeing the same thing that still haunted my dreams – Green Winters and his broken back. “The truth is, I resented you already, so you were a soft target.” She finally glanced at me. “I’m disappointed in myself for that.”

Everything was making a lot more sense, and I was feeling like a real asshole. Eiger struck me as the type who didn’t have a lot of friends, but the ones she had, she treasured. And you didn’t just love Monika a little. So in I’d strolled, Monika’s old friend from Back in the Day, with our in-jokes and our stories and all that history. How could she not feel like she was being pushed aside? And then Glory and Dietrich had taken my side after the fiasco at Harfeld, and…

“Eiger, I don’t blame you for being angry with me. We didn’t get off to the greatest start. Let’s fix that.”

She nodded again, staring up at the sky between the bare branches. Things were right on the point of getting awkward again when she said, in a more conversational tone, “You know, I really hate the Flux State. It’s so...disorganized. But Monika loved it.”

I followed her gaze upward. “She really did.”

“I personally don’t see the appeal of anarchism as a political ideology.”

I smiled a little. “It’s kind of counter-intuitive. But here, for right now, it seems to work. What more can you ask for?” 

“Stability?” 

“Let’s not get too ambitious.” The corner of her mouth moved, and I felt a thrill of victory. I felt like I was finally beginning to make sense of her. “You were in the KSK, right?”

“I was. Still would be, but...”

“But something went wrong?”

“Yeah.” Silence again. Something always goes wrong. Nobody becomes a shadowrunner because things went right. Except maybe Monika. And Dietrich.

I cringed a little at the thought of him, hopefully just on the inside. We’d been giving each other a lot of space since the Humanis run. Which was a euphemism for: We'd been avoiding one another. It was stupid, and juvenile, but the honest truth of the matter was that I’d had full-fledged sexual encounters, hours in duration, that had been less intimate than that sixty or so seconds of hand holding and eye contact. And I had absolutely no idea what to do with that. My only consolation was that Dietrich obviously didn’t know either. 

I pushed it out of my mind, because Eiger was speaking again. “But I’m still a soldier, Zee. I’ve tried, but I can’t wash that out. God knows Monika tried,” she said. “It’s who I am. Which means I like order. I like hierarchy. I like clear-cut objectives.”

I couldn’t stifle a little snort of laughter. “Yeah, no wonder you hate the F-State.” She rolled her eyes, but there was something good-natured in it, almost like we’d shared a joke.

“And yet it doesn’t hate me. So I guess that’s something. A state that isn’t a state, a polity that isn’t a polity, home to all the misfit toys.” _If you were looking for a place to land, you’ve found it_ , a memory said. Dietrich, in my head again. Dammit. 

I examined Eiger’s profile. With her skillset, she probably could have found any number of merc outfits that would have showered her with all the nuyen and bennies her heart could desire. She’d stayed in the land of misfit toys anyway, running the shadows with an anarchist and her merry band of oddballs, and it had obviously been for Monika’s sake that she had. But Monika was gone. “Eiger,” I said slowly, “I can’t promise you that there will always been order, or hierarchy. But I know I need somebody to call me on my shit, force me to explain myself. You’ve done a pretty good job of that so far. Why not keep it up?”

She cocked an eyebrow. “That’s a stupidly easy job.”

“Then you have no excuse to fuck it up.”

She chuckled, a sound of genuine amusement. “Fair hit, fearless leader.” She glanced at me sidelong. “I also like being part of a team that runs like a well-oiled machine. Everything square?”

I sighed. I could have said that of course Eiger, with her sniper’s eyes, had noticed, and what a delicate touch, not even mentioning Dietrich’s name. But you wouldn’t need augmented vision and a high-end scope to see that he and I were not square. Honestly, it stung a bit. I’m not the most open person, but Dietrich is. He wears his emotions like a second skin, wide open in his affections, his feelings as obvious as his tattoos. You always know where you stand with Dietrich, except that I didn’t anymore, and for reasons that I never could have fathomed before coming to Berlin, that really bothered me. “No,” I said. “I need to talk to him.”

“Good,” she said briskly. “We’re more efficient in the field when we don’t have baggage weighing us down.”

“So that’s what this was about?”

“Yes. Getting to the bottom of this Firewing thing isn’t going to be easy, so there’s no reason to make it harder by holding grudges. And I’m not too proud to admit that I was wrong. You have potential.” That was quite possible the best endorsement I could have hoped for. She stood, brushing off her legs. “I need to go see Mettbach. He promised he’d have my new sights in today. See you around.”

I watched her stride off. It felt good to have cleared the air with her, at least. I respected the hell out of her, and it gave me a little spark of hope for the success of this crazy quest we’d taken on, because if Eiger and I could build a bridge, all kinds of things seemed suddenly within the realm of the possible. But Dietrich…

God, I didn’t even know where to start. Mainly because I couldn’t think of how to broach the subject in a way that wouldn’t make me want to die of embarrassment. Which just made it worse. I was a grown-ass woman! How does a grown-ass woman say, “So holding your hand the other night was amazing,” without cringing all the way down to the subatomic level?

But it had been amazing. His fingers had been callused and a little dry, but it hadn’t mattered. The light of the mandala had danced in his eyes, washing waves of gold and violet-blue over the brown. Magic had always just been the manipulation of energy to me before, stock stuff, nothing to get excited about, but this had been _wondrous_. And he had shared that wonder with me, like a secret meant for us alone. It had been like the entirety of the Sixth World had contracted down to a little circle encompassing just him and me, and we hadn’t had to _say_ anything. Maybe saying things just got in the way.

I made a circuit of the kiez, checking in on people, keeping a light finger on the pulse of the place. I spotted Alexander outside Samuel’s place, wielding a large push broom with an air of determination. The old soldier Laine was sitting out on a bench, taking in the sun, and we exchanged a nod as I passed. There was a BTL junkie named Kim I kept an eye on, making sure she actually ate on occasion. Zaak Flash had set up in the square again, hitting on anything with a working circulatory system while pushing Jazz and Bliss and his homebrew Flash. I warned him to be discriminating in who he did business with (no kids or I’d break his kneecaps), and reminded him that no meant no (or I’d break his kneecaps). And as I walked, I thought. 

Why did there need to be A Talk? Why make a thing of it? Dietrich and I had just sort of fallen in together anyway. We hadn’t decided we were going to be friends; it had been the natural outgrowth of spending time together. I liked talking to him, I liked joking with him, I liked drinking with him, I liked just generally being around him. And if I was being honest with myself, there was something attractive about him. Something magnetic, that reoriented me towards him like a compass needle. So did that that mean I was attracted _to_ him? Maybe. But why did it need to be defined? So we could slap a label on it and put it on a shelf? Did I really want to do that? Did he?

He was in the common area when I got back to the safehouse, lounging on the couch with one arm spread along the top of the cushions, nursing his flask. He saw me and straightened, as if he were about to get up. I held up a hand and he subsided, watching me carefully. I very purposefully sat down beside him, almost close enough to touch, my shoulders resting against his outstretched arm. He raised his eyebrows questioningly, and I met his gaze, and shrugged. He looked at me for a moment, some internal debate playing out behind his eyes, then nodded, and offered me the flask. I took a small pull. He turned on the trid. We were square.


	7. Clean Slate

There was a new item at the top of my to-do list for when I got home: Fucking kill Blitz. I informed him of this. He didn’t even have the decency to sound hurt.

“Aw c’mon, chief. You’re almost there.”

He may only be a couple of years younger than me (and nearly half a meter taller), but Blitz brings out a weirdly protective big sister side of me. I think it’s because he reminds me of kids Monika and I used to run with, kids picked off by life, pulled into harm’s way by bad luck and worse decisions. The ones who survived usually wound up as gangers or mercs, and the fact that Blitz had managed to engineer his escape from that life said something about him.

At the moment, I wasn’t sure _what_ exactly it said.

He’d come to me with his heart in his stupid big brown eyes. “I’ve gotta make this right, Zee. So long as I still owe Meat Grinder, I’ve got a big target on my back, and you or the rest of the crew might get hit by the crossfire. I know I’ve got a good thing going here, and I don’t want to frag it up. Also,” he'd added honestly, "I really don't wanna die."

When I told the others that I was going to help Blitz clear his debt, their reactions had not been encouraging. Eiger had made several graphic and anatomically specific threats against his person if any harm should come to me, and while it was heartening that our relationship had improved to the point she was willing to violently castrate someone for me, I wasn’t sure how helpful that was. Glory had simply patted me on the shoulder.

I’d gone ahead with it anyway. Sentimentality will get you killed in this line of work, but I was determined that if anyone was going to die because of this, it would be Blitz.

So I was in Drogenkippe, robbing a bank (in a manner of speaking), joined by the guarantor of Blitz’s debt to Herr Grinder, a completely humorless man who called himself Hasenkamp. Meanwhile, the debtor in question was safely ensconced at Cafe Cezve, running the op from cozy comfort while I froze and/or got shot at. As far as I was concerned, he was just trading one debt for another at this point.

“Okay, Blitz, now what?” I asked, leaning against a newly hacked door console. Which had been my work, by the way.

“Now we just head into the vault, chief.”

Hasenkamp cleared his throat. “I assume there’ll be no more surprises?”

“We’re right on schedule!” Blitz said brightly, then switched to my ears only. “Seriously, though, Zee, this guy isn’t just a suit. Watch your six.”

No shit Hasenkamp wasn’t just a suit. He was trying like hell to give the impression of a poor, beleaguered numbers guy, but you don’t work for someone who goes by the name of Meat Grinder professionally if you can’t handle yourself at least a little. I was getting the distinct impression there was more to this mess than Blitz had let on. Whoever owned this place – whoever Blitz was having us steal from – had some serious nuyen to burn. The level of security we were having to crack was ample proof of that. But I was in the middle of it now, and the only way out of the problem was through it. We entered the vault, and Hasenkamp made a beeline for a row of lockboxes. He typed in a passcode, and withdrew its contents – a fist full of credsticks, a few data drives, and a small, metallic cube. In my ear, I heard Blitz inhale.

“Hey, that thing’s supposed to be mine!”

“You didn’t mention anything about picking up souvenirs, Blitz.”

“I wasn’t sure it would be here. I mean, I was hoping it would be, but I couldn’t be sure-”

“Forget it,” I said, and snatched the cube out of Hasenkamp’s hand before he could put it in his case. He raised an eyebrow.

“I believe the deal was that our mutual friend would get us into this vault and that its contents would satisfy his debt to my employer.”

“And I’m fairly certain that those credsticks and paydata are more than fat enough for that. What’s one memento for the road?”

He looked at me in stiff silence, then said, “Everything else appears to be in order. Let’s go.”

“Blitz, we’re ready when you are.”

Silence.

“Blitz?”

“Um, so here’s the thing. The vault’s alarm system have an access timer, and when that timer runs out, there will be…countermeasures.”

“We didn’t set off the alarm.”

“Not yet you haven’t.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means…I’m not sure I can get you back out without tripping it.”

Oh my God. “Did you know about that before you sent us in?”

“Kinda?”

“Oh fuck me,” I groaned.

“I’m flattered, Zee, but I thought you were into older men. Now gimme a second.”

I could hear him typing rapidly, so I used the interval to seethe a little. So this was what it had come to, huh? I could have played dumb, acted outraged, demanded to know what the hell he meant by that, but there was no point in being disingenuous. There are really no secrets in a crew of runners like ours, especially when you live together. Dietrich and I were close, and that partiality was obvious, and it came with the territory that ribbing would occur. And the fact that Blitz felt comfortable enough to make that crack meant he probably knew what had happened the night before, too.

How nice that he was feeling so at home. Really.

I’d been getting a little obsessed with Green Wint- I mean, Hermann Vauclair’s DVD vlogs. Maliit Holyey at the tech shop had been working through restoring them in her spare time, and every time she got one converted, I devoured it. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was that they represented knowledge, and information was in such short supply. Or maybe it was the memory of his ruined body on the floor of that shitty hotel room, and the feeling that, somehow, I had to make his death mean something. Whatever it was, I’d been up late watching and rewatching the latest one, and time got away from me.

A door opened, casting a rectangle of light into the dim common. Dietrich stood there, framed in the doorway of his room, arms crossed over his bare chest. (Of course he wore blackwatch plaid boxers. _Of course_ he did.) “Zee? What are you still doing up?”

“Research,” I said shortly. “Don’t worry about me, Dietrich. Go back to bed.”

“Can’t do that, boss.” Funny how it’s all ‘love’ and _‘Liebchen’_ until I tell him what to do.

I scrubbed my eyes. “Seriously, Dietrich. I need to understand this. The Dragonfall, his brother…If I can just-”

He grabbed me by the shoulders and hauled me to my feet facing him. I glared. “Zee,” he said gently, “you’re exhausted. Your aura’s broadcastin' it so loud I can hear it from the next room. This will all still be here in the morning.”

“There’s so much here-”

“I know. But wearing yourself out won’t make it make sense any faster. Come on.” He dropped his hands from my shoulders to give me a hug, and I slumped against him, my face buried against his neck, too tired for nerves or propriety. His skin smelled so good – like the heat of a forge and the ozone of a lightning strike, something warm and undeniably male. My legs went a little weak. I blamed the lack of sleep.

“Dietrich, I can’t-”

“Shh, _Schatzi_ ,” he soothed, holding me close. His left hand slid slowly up my back, under my hair to clasp the nape of my neck. I inhaled-

And woke up in my bed.

I lay there for a moment, blinking sleep out of my eyes. The bedside lamp was on, set to its lowest illumination. I was tucked in under the covers, and had no idea how I’d gotten there. I pulled at the bedspread, but it seemed to be pinned under something heavy. Had Dante tried to get into bed with me again? I rolled over, and there was Dietrich.

He was asleep, and for a moment, I just lay there and watched him breathe. I itched to touch his tattoos, to trace their angular geometry with my fingertips. But I kept my hands to myself, following them instead with my eyes, from his scalp down his neck, flowing across his shoulders and torso, disappearing into the waistband of his boxers. They were strange and beautiful, which sort of summed him up, really. Mixed with the rough-hewn, primal, shamanistic tats - sharp-cornered runes, concentric circles and interlaced spirals, messages written on his skin in a language as old as the world - were the punk exclamations in old style blackletter writing, the knife emblazoned with the name of his band, and the anarchy symbol. They were the real thing, too – done the old school way with ink and needle and blood. My dermalprint chestpiece looked cheap and garish by comparison.

Then I realized what had happened, and I poked him hard in the side. “You son of a bitch! You magicked me!”

He opened one eye. “You got some sleep, didn’t you?”

“Because you magicked me!”

He rolled onto his side, propping himself up on his elbow. “And would you have gone to bed if I hadn’t?”

“Eventually,” I sniffed.

“So I was right, and that was my only play.”

I glared at him. I wasn’t sure I approved of Sneaky Dietrich. “What are you doing in here anyway?”

He looked askance, and holy shit, I had finally seen actual embarrassment on the face of Dietrich Farber. “You just…you looked so peaceful. I guess I fell asleep too.”

And just like that, parity returned and all was forgiven. “So you whisked me off to bed like the hero of some romance vid? Did you behave yourself?” I smiled archly.

“Of course I did, because I am a fucking gentleman!” He quirked an eyebrow at me. “Why? Disappointed?”

“Nah. If you were gonna do things you shouldn’t, I’d rather be awake for it.”

Certain key facts about the situation that had been roiling around in my rear brain finally managed to push their way to my conscious mind, and as the words left my mouth, I could see a similar dataset resolving itself in Dietrich’s eyes.

  1. We were laying on my narrow bed with only a few inches of space separating our bodies. 

a) I was under the covers and he was on top of them, but that was an extremely momentary inconvenience.

  2. He was dressed only in his underwear, and I was in a tee shirt and...yep, he’d taken my pants off me when he put me to bed. 

a) When you’re a shadowrunner, you will see your crew in various states of undress. It happens, and no professional will ever make a thing out of it.

     i) This was different. 

  3. The conversation had developed a sudden and distinct sexual subtext. 

a) Or maybe it was just text.




He rolled off the bed. “I should go.”

I wanted to say: Don’t. Stay. Please. No more flirting, no more talking, just stay and be next to me because I-

The fact that I couldn’t finish that sentence is why I said, instead, “Yeah.”

He’d slipped out, in nothing but his boxers, and Blitz must have seen him.

I’d sought him out before leaving for Drogenkippe – I didn’t want a repeat of our previous awkwardness. He was in the armory, sitting at one of the workbenches with no less than a dozen knives in front of him, carefully honing the one in his hand. It’s a good thing that he likes me, because he is terrifying with those things. “Dietrich-” I began. He glanced over his shoulder.

“We’re good, love.” I didn’t believe him, and that must have shown on my face, because he set down the knife, turned, and shot me one of his lopsided smiles. “Zee, we’re good. Things happen.”

I nodded. That was good enough for me. “Okay.”

“Headin’ out?”

“Yeah. Blitz’s thing.”

He sighed. “Don’t let him get you killed.”

“It’ll be fine, Dietrich,” I said, with more confidence than I felt. I’m not sure what prompted the impulse, but I reached over and gave his head a vigorous rub. He must have shaved that morning; his scalp was amazingly smooth. “For luck,” I explained, grinning.

He raised a dubious eyebrow, then smiled back, took my face in both hands, and planted a kiss on my forehead. “For luck, then.”

The mark of his lips on my skin was warm long after I left the room. _Things happen._

Yeah, because we kept letting them happen.

“Uh-oh.”

I’ll take ‘Things you never want to hear a decker say’ for a thousand. “Blitz, I do not like the sound of that.”

“Um, well… There’s a complication.”

I sighed and rubbed my forehead. So much for luck. “You don’t say.”

Hasenkamp rolled his eyes. “I suppose it was too much to ask that this actually go according to plan?”

I can bag on Blitz all day, but that’s because he’s one of mine. I shot the accountant a nasty look. “Save it. Blitz? What are we looking at?”

“Yeah, I’m not going to be able to keep the alarm from activating. Sorry, chief, but you’re gonna have to just bull through.”

“Can we get on with it then?” Hasenkamp groused, drawing a hefty looking pistol. How thoroughly unsurprising. I gave a three count on my fingers and we barreled out of the vault. On cue, the alarm began to blare.

As we ran, Blitz spoke. “Okay, those countermeasures I mentioned? They’re active. You’ve got incoming.” We slowed, approaching another locked door. I fiddled with the console. It chimed, almost cheerfully, and the red backlight pinged over to a soothing green. “But that door was easy to hack, so that’s a positive.”

“You’re right, Blitz, that is positive.”

“Oh, and Zee?” He was back on my private channel. “There’s a good chance Hasenkamp there may try to gank you on the way out, so…head’s up.”

“Great,” I sighed.

The building that housed the vault wasn’t big, but its back halls were labyrinthine, doubtless designed with malefactors like us in mind. I could hear heavy footfalls approaching, and we cut quickly around a corner. I chanced a glance back to see our pursuers. Shit. There were half a dozen of them –a trio of orks, two trolls, and a human so chromed out it took a double take to recognize him as such. They were kitted out in heavy body armor, real high end gear, and heavier guns. They’d rip through Hasenkamp and me like tissue. The corridor dead-ended on yet another locked door, and as soon as they rounded the corner they’d be on us. One of the orks reached to his belt for something. A grenade, probably a flash-bang or some kind of gas. “Hasenkamp!” I hissed. “Move!”

We charged for the door, and I ran an override on the locking mechanism. The grenade pinged off the wall as it sailed around the corner, and the door slid shut behind us just as a flash of dazzling white light illuminated the little security window like a lightning strike. “Blitz!” I snapped. “Jam the security overrides so they can’t reopen that door!”

“On it.”

Hasenkamp and I raced down the corridor. I glanced over my shoulder; they were at the door, trying their codes. “C’mon, Blitz,” I muttered. “C’mon…” The console blared angrily, an error message flashing in all caps. Blitz whooped in triumph. I hoped that everyone at the café was giving him very dirty looks.

We charged through the exit doors and out into the alley, cold night air and the general funk of Drogenkippe assailing us in turn. My cheeks puffed out with a relieved breath, and I turned, ready to tell Hasenkamp I most politely wished to never see him again. He had his gun raised. I sighed. “Seriously?”

“The cube, if you please,” he said. He extended his free hand.

I didn’t move. “You’ll shoot me anyway.”

“Likely, yes. But I’d rather not have to search you to find it. I don’t know where you’ve been.”

“Rude.”

“Truthful.” He waved the gun. “Slowly now. Nothing funny.”

“Hasenkamp,” Blitz said urgently, “when I popped the vault, I snagged some security files. You, and I, and Zee were all flagged as kill on sight for the sec detail tonight. Somebody knew you were going to be here.”

There was only one somebody who could have known when he’d be at the vault. And that I would be with him. I could see the realization play out across his face. “You’re lying,” he said, eyes narrowed as if he squint Blitz into corporeality there with us.

“I can show you. Check the files. Not a single fingerprint from me.”

“Sounds like your boss was planning to kill two birds with one stone,” I said. “If you’ll pardon the pun.”

“I have been loyal for YEARS!” Hasenkamp snarled.

“You know, Blitz,” I said conversationally, “I bet he wasn’t even planning on honoring your settlement.”

“Probably not,” Blitz agreed morosely.

A constellation of questions, answers, reservations, and denials washed over Hasenkamp’s face, all in an instant. Lips pursed and eyes tight, he stared somewhere over my shoulder into the chill, stinking darkness. I still didn’t move though. Something about his posture told me any acts of bravery on my part would end poorly. And then his gaze met mine, and in his eyes I saw acceptance, and behind that, the righteous fury of the betrayed. He holstered his pistol. “Keep it,” he said shortly. “Grinder may have wanted it, but he’s not going to want much of anything for much longer. Have a nice life.” He turned and stalked off into the shadows. I had a feeling Meat Grinder would soon be experiencing intense regret, followed by fatal injury. The world wasn’t losing much.

“Well, that ended…weirdly,” I said.

“Hey, any run you can walk away from, right, chief?” Blitz’s voice was full of forced good cheer.

“Something like that. We’ll talk when I get home.”

It wasn’t until I was back on the U-Bahn that I realized how parental that had sounded. Oh well. Blitz needed a little stern authority in his life. Might be good for him. I pulled the little cube out of my pocket and peered at it. It looked like some kind of dual storage/boot device. Considering its provenance, I wasn’t about to hook it up to my deck, but it was intriguing all the same. I briefly entertained the idea of holding it hostage for Blitz’s good behavior.

In the back room of Reine Neugier, Paul Amsel’s cluttered import/export shop, there’s a hidden door that leads to the warren of rooms and hallways that makes up our safehouse. Blitz was waiting for me, just on the other side of it. He thrust a takeaway cup from Altuğ's at me. “I got you a soykaf.”

I had to smile. He was still in trouble, but he really was just a big dumb puppy of a guy, knocking things over and never quite sure how big his paws were. I took a sip, and reached into my pocket for his cube, holding it out on the palm of my hand. His eyes lit up, but I closed my fingers over it. “Alright, Blitz, what did we learn today?”

“Um…communication is key?”

“Yeah, that’s a good one. How about also that from now on we’ll let Paul do the run planning, because he’s much, MUCH better at it than you?”

He nodded. “Yeah, he is.” I handed him the cube.

“What’s loaded on this thing anyway?”

“Comm hackware,” he replied, grinning. “I’m gonna be playing with this baby for a while.” His smile faded. “But this is just icing. The big thing is you got me clear. I really needed that slate clean, chief. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“And uh…the thing I said…about you and older men. I’m sorry about that. That was kinda…uncalled for.”

I punched his shoulder lightly as I passed him ( _really_ lightly, considering what he’d put me through), headed for a) the shower, and b) my bed. “It’s okay, Blitz. Things happen.”


	8. Echoes

“You did the right thing,” Glory said quietly. Her cool metal fingers dug slightly into my arms as she helped me sit up. I winced. I was inclined to agree with her, but at the moment, that was comfort chillier than her hands. 

We’d gone to the AG Chemie Europa facility to ‘extract a prototype’. Standard corporate espionage, really. Back in the RuhrPlex, this sort of thing had been my specialty. And it was supposed to have gone down smooth – the client had already done the work of neutralizing security, and our main purpose was infiltration and removal. Only it hadn’t, naturally. I’d taken a close-range shotgun blast right to the gut in the midst of our escape (good thing I’d bought that new body armor Eiger’d been pressuring me to get), and we’d discovered the prototype was alive.

I wondered who he’d been, the troll buried under all that chrome and wiring. What life had he led, and how had it come to that? Had those mods been forced on him, or had he known, or thought he’d known, what he was getting into? Had he realized that they were turning him into a drone, a meatpuppet, a cyberzombie? Had there ever been any choice at all?

I closed my eyes and leaned back against my pillow. At least it was over now. Glory had figured out how to disconnect the control circuitry, so we had given him his choice. And back in control of his own body, he’d exercised his free will, ending it. “I have a feeling I’m going to be getting a nasty comm call shortly, Glory.”

“We did our job,” she replied. “If they wanted him alive, they should have specified.” I chuckled grimly.

“Oh, I agree. Doesn’t mean I think our client will.” I shifted, trying to get comfortable, something that was proving far more difficult than it should. Glory took the opportunity to check my vitals again.

“It will be a few hours,” she said. With clinical ease, she lifted my shirt, revealing the massive purple-black bruise that covered almost all of my torso. Spidery blossoms of dark red coursed through the heart of the impact point, mapping the burst blood vessels. Dietrich’s quick magical intervention had staved off the worst of the internal bleeding, so now I got to wait and ache while the hema-vascular agent fed through the IV in my hand did its slow work. “But you are improving.”

“I’m glad one of us can tell.” 

She smiled, which is to say her eyes crinkled and faint dimples appeared in her cheeks where the corners of her mouth lifted. She must have had a beautiful smile once. I wondered, for the nth time, where it had gone.

“You’ve been very patient with me, Zee,” she said, and I blinked. Could she read minds or something?

“You mean about…?” I had no idea how to finish that.

“Yes.”

“Well, I figured that if you were ever ready to tell me, you would, so…”

“So you waited. Patiently. That’s very kind of you.”

I tried to shrug nonchalantly, but it hurt too much. “You deserve it. Kindness, I mean. Space. Respect. Does that make sense? I feel like it doesn’t.”

Another little smile. “It does.”

If she was going to offer me her confidence, it seemed grossly unfair that I not return the favor. “When I came here, I said I just needed a change of scenery. But you know that wasn’t the whole truth.”

“Of course not. It never is.”

“Yeah.” I took a deep, careful breath. “I had a good thing going in the RuhrPlex. A good crew. Our home base was in Düsseldorf. We did a lot of corp jobs, stuff like tonight.

“Our sam was a guy named Ritcher – a total pro. Solid, dependable, practical. Eiger would have liked him. Then a run went bad; we barely made it out with our lives, and it was obvious we’d been set up. I started digging, and all the evidence pointed to Ritcher, so I confronted him.” I cleared my throat. I hadn’t told this part to anyone, not even Dietrich. Only Monika had known. I forced myself to look at Glory, and forced myself to say the words. “I killed him. I thought he was a traitor, and I killed him.”

“But he wasn’t.” No judgment, no anger, no disgust. Just a statement.

“No, he wasn’t. About a month before, we’d brought in an extra decker to help with a job. He thought he got stiffed, so he went behind our backs to our client, tanked the run and framed Ritcher for it.” I took another breath, steadying my voice. “When I realized what I’d done-”

“You had to burn the bridge.”

“Yeah. Fortunately, Monika was there with a rope.”

Glory nodded. “She was good at that.” _Like a ministering angel_ , Dietrich had said. Yeah. Just like that. “Sometimes you do have to make a hard break with the past,” she said. She touched her right shoulder lightly. “These are proof of that.” 

And then she told me. Everything.

She told me about her father, ruined by war, about his rage and magiphobia. She told me of her Awakening, and how she’d ended up on the streets to escape him. That was a story I’d heard often enough – far too many parents of Awakened children, whether it was magic or goblinization, could never seem to handle the truth of who their kids were. And the next part wasn’t unfamiliar either; she’d fallen in other lost street kids. I’d known those little gutter families, though I’d never been part of one myself. They loved and guarded each other with all the fierceness of the families that had rejected them, so it was no wonder she’d fallen for Marta. Even retold in her steady, dispassionate voice, it was obvious what that girl had meant to her, which made the rest all the worse.

Because this was a story I hadn’t heard already, in different iterations and forms. The beloved Marta brought her to a man named Harrow, who promised to shape Glory’s talents, to give her power and strength and revenge.

And all for the low, low price of her soul.

Between the painkillers and the exhaustion, it had taken me perhaps longer than it should to ask the question of why: If she was Awakened, if she was magically talented, why the chrome? Magic and cyberware don’t mix after all…

Oh no.

“That was when I realized who it was. Harrow’s totem, and by extension, the source of my own power,” she said. I swallowed, beginning to dread the revelation. “The Horned Man. Old Scratch. The Adversary.”

“The devil?” I gaped at her.

“In a manner of speaking. By then, I didn’t really care. It felt too good – belonging, not being afraid. I wanted to prove how unafraid I was. I wanted to prove it to the one person who’d made me more afraid than anyone else.” With growing horror, I began to see where this was going, and my stomach, already queasy from the bruising and meds, seemed to roll slowly inside me. “I was going to destroy him, show him through hellfire what I really thought of him. He’d beaten me and called me the Devil’s whore, so wouldn’t it be funny to show him how right he’d been? Wouldn’t that be just what he deserved?

“But when I went to the door, it wasn’t my father who answered. I couldn’t stop what I was about to do, though. So I killed my mother. Burned her up. And all she’d even tried to do was help me. That was when I finally realized what I’d let in. What I’d become.”

And that was when it hit me, worse by far than the punch of a shotgun. You don’t just stop doing magic. Once an Awakened individual opens themselves up to a source of power, that conduit can never truly be closed. But magic and cyberware don’t mix. My hand flew to my mouth so fast I almost wrenched out the IV. “Oh my God, Glory,” I whispered between my fingers. 

She smiled again, lips trembling slightly. With great care, she reached out and covered my free hand with hers. I stared down at it, at the articulated metal fingers, oversized to make room for the sheathing that held her unextended razors. “I had to. And I’ve made my peace with it, mostly,” she said. “But that’s easier now, I guess. I still have emotions, they just…come from a long way away. Like echoes.”

I’d known runners who’d happily lopped off healthy limbs for the advantages that good cyberware afforded. And though I’d never felt the need to do that myself, I’d understood it. But this… I felt sick, and gulped hard against my rising gorge. Glory delicately caught my chin with her other hand, lifting my head to meet her gaze. It must have taken so much practice, I thought, so much effort to learn how to use those unwieldy, ill-fitted arms so gracefully. “I’m sorry, Glory,” I managed. “I am so, so sorry.”

“Why apologize?” 

“Because I don’t know what else to say.”

Yet another tiny smile. This one actually reached her eyes. “You’re a good friend, Zee.”

There was a light tap at the door. I cleared my throat and took a breath to center myself. Glory settled back into the chair she’d pulled up to my bedside. “Come in,” I said. 

Paul entered diffidently. How civilized of him, that he was so conscious of our personal space within the building he himself owned. He could have demanded access to every ammo locker and underwear drawer, but instead he treated the private areas of the safe house as if they had maglocks on the doors and lines of salt on the thresholds. He gave his glasses an absent nudge. “How’s the patient?”

“Once the hema-vascular treatment’s done, she’ll really just need a good night’s sleep,” Glory said. She glanced towards me. “It really is lucky that Dietrich was able to act so quickly,” she added, not for the first or even second time. “Otherwise, this would have taken a lot longer.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Paul said. “I thought you would like to know that I just got finished with an extremely acrimonious call with Herr Schmidt.”

“Told you,” I said to Glory. “Let me guess. Pissed off about the dead troll?”

“To put it mildly. But I reminded him that the job had been to retrieve the prototype and that you had done so. Anything more was bickering over semantics.”

“Told you,” Glory said to me. I made a face at her.

“He then threatened to withhold our payment.” 

“He WHAT?” I half started from my bed. It hurt.

“But I told him that if he did, I would make sure he wouldn’t be able to hire a team of shadowrunners to so much as walk his dog in this city ever again.”

Glory looked pleased. “You’re wonderful, Paul.” He preened slightly at the compliment.

“This is important. Not just for our continued viability in the business, but most especially now.”

The money for Alice. Paul had had to go way, WAY outside his normal network of intel brokers to get us what we needed to put together the pieces of the puzzle Hermie Vauclair had left us. And Alice, the one name wonder of the information marketplace, did not come cheap. Paul had even put his own personal savings into the fund to buy her aid. I smiled at him, shaking my head in amazement.

“Paul, how did you ever even get into this line of work?”

He shrugged, self-deprecating. “It started out as a sideline, really. The vids may try to tell you differently, but the rare goods market really isn’t all that exciting. I suppose I was thrill seeking. But I enjoyed it, and discovered I was good at it, and at some point along the way, fixing became the full time job and the shop became the sideline. I’m not sure when exactly that occurred, honestly.” He adjusted his glasses again. “At any rate, rest assured we will be getting paid for this evening’s work. I’ll leave you to your rest, Zee. Good evening, ladies.”

He took his leave as quietly as he’d entered. “He has got to be, hands down, the best fixer I’ve ever worked with,” I said.

“No argument here,” Glory said. “He’s a lovely man.” That was true. You run into so many nasty sorts in the shadows – con men and hucksters, shady types only out for number one. But Paul Amsel was honest, which made him a rare creature indeed, rarer than any treasure that might pass the doors of his shop.

She carefully pulled the IV stint, cleaning and bandaging the little hole. “There. Get some sleep. You may not be one hundred percent by morning, but you’ll be close.” She touched my shoulder by way of farewell, and slipped out of the room. As she left, Dante entered, settling himself into a giant doggy heap at the foot of the bed with a heavy, satisfied sigh. That sounded like an excellent idea, and I dozed off.

Sometime later, I woke. Someone was sitting in the chair Glory had left, their feet propped up on the end of the bed. Dietrich roused himself as I did. “Hey,” he said quietly, his voice rusty with sleep. “How are you feeling, _Schatzi_?”

I poked lightly at my midsection. It was considerably less tender. “Better.” I smiled at him. “Making sure Dante doesn’t eat me?”

On cue, Dante snuffled loudly in his sleep, and Dietrich returned the smile. “Something like that. I’ll go if you want.”

_Don’t. Stay. Please. Just stay and be next to me because I-_

_Because I like it when you are._

“You don’t have to.” I scooted over a little. “You don’t even have to stay in the chair. I know that can’t be comfortable.”

He raised an eyebrow. “You sure?” I nodded.

“Well,” he said, stretching, “I am getting kinda old for sleeping in chairs.” He climbed under the covers beside me (still fully clothed, I noted with a whisper of something that felt like disappointment) and carefully slipped an arm under my shoulders. I rolled against his chest and closed my eyes, breathing in the scent of him, enjoying the warmth of his body against my still aching muscles. It was funny. I’d lived all my life in the Rhine-Ruhr MegaPlex, from birth to just a few months before, but I’d never felt like I really belonged there. Maybe I’d been waiting my whole life for Berlin, for the Kreuzbasar, for these people. For this.


	9. Blood

She’d come to us afraid, and she was right to be, as we would soon discover. She was easy to spot when I entered the café, even though she’d chosen a corner booth, because the exact look that would have been completely ordinary at some corporate watering hole - the tasteful, expensive but not flashy uniform of the mid-to-upper level management woman – made her exotic in the Kreuzbasar. She swallowed as I approached her, and though she was doing her damnedest not to let it show on her face, I could see the full weight of what she was doing settling in on her. She was crossing over to the other side, and here lurked strange things beyond her imagination. Things like me.

She extended her hand anyway. “You are Zee?” I shook it, and sat across from her.

“And you’re Frau Müller.”

“For now.” She smiled nervously, glancing down at the cup in front of her. She’d sprung for some of Altuğ's real Turkish coffee, another standout move. “I understand pseudonyms are a part of how this business is conducted.” She spoke German easily and without hesitation, with an accent that reminded me of Dr. Ezkibel who ran the cyberclinic. Her consonants were sharper, though, so not Spanish. Atzlaner, perhaps? 

“Better for everyone involved.” I folded my arms on the table and fixed her with my most professional expression. Corporate types are jumpy, and it helps to make sure they understand you are an expert in your field. “Now what can I do for you?”

She took a fortifying sip of her coffee. “I am involved in a project that must be ended. No. More than that. It must be destroyed.”

My eyebrows lifted of their own accord. Strong words. Corp jockeys, especially those who’d ascended to the gentry of management, tended not to have opinions of any kind about their work. Especially not negative ones. “Tell me about this project.”

“It is code-named Bloodline, and it is…” She took a breath, collecting herself. “It is altogether horrifying.” She folded her hands around her cup. They seemed to be shaking slightly. “Obviously, I am not German… Fräulein Zee.”

“Atzlan?” She nodded, and I spared a moment to pat myself on the back for my deduction. Of course, since I was right, that meant... “So your employer is Aztechnology.” She nodded again, and I let out a breath. This was the big leagues, and if I was too generous with self-congratulation, I’d wrench my arm out of the socket. 

“So you can understand that I have a somewhat different definition of ‘horrifying’ than you might.”

My turn to nod. Aztechnology has a fearsome rep in the shadows, and they’ve earned it. I’ve never been sure how accurate the stories of what goes on in Atzlan are, but the tales of blood and violence seemed to be accurate enough as a baseline. “What does destroying Project Bloodline entail? Data destruction? Smashing up a lab or two? Some targeted personnel changes?”

“All of that and more, Fräulein Zee,” she said, looking me square in the eye. “I want you to destroy the entire facility. All of it. Nothing can remain.”

She was deadly serious. I could see that in her eyes. But did she really know what she was requesting? 

“That’s a big ask, Frau Müller.”

“I know. But Project Bloodline is _evil_. It must be ended with the most extreme sanction, or countless lives will be lost.”

I leaned back in my chair. Either she was the most straight-faced liar I had ever met (and you meet more than your fair share in the shadows), or she genuinely believed what she was saying. “I’ll have to discuss this with my team, but…consider this a provisional yes. I’ll be in touch.”

Relief flooded her face. “I look forward to hearing from you.”

It was ultimately that look of relief that made up my mind. I’ve taken all manner of jobs from slippery desk monkeys looking to trash someone else’s work in the hopes of raising their own stock. Hiring runners to bring an in-house competitor’s project to a screeching halt (thus ruining them in the god-like eyes of Upper Management) is so commonplace it’s a cliché. But she was asking us to destroy her own project, and being told that destruction would happen visibly lifted a weight from her shoulders. _That_ was not at all common to my experience of these sorts of jobs, so I was just intrigued enough give it a try. And the payout promised to be excellent. Frau Müller was putting her money where her mouth was. That helped, too.

Ultimately, the run was a masterpiece of Paul’s operational planning skills. Frau Müller had held nothing back, and the wealth of information she’d provided meant that we were going in well-armed in knowledge, and that was every bit as valuable as firepower. Two days before the main run, Blitz and I hit the offices of OTK International, bugging the hired gun Knight Errant security comms and providing Paul with a backdoor to watch the watchmen. The Azzie facility itself was powered by a bank of generators, deep in a sub-basement; overloading them would provide us with our demolition.

Dietrich rolled his shoulders as we made our way through the dark streets of the Jewühl District towards the fortified research compound. “Got a weird feeling about tonight, boss,” he said. “On the one hand, takin’ a swing at a corp like Aztechnology – can’t go wrong there. On the other…”

“We’re blowing up a building?” Blitz supplied.

“With God knows how many people inside?” Glory added. 

“We’re here to do a job,” Eiger said stiffly. She didn’t care for navel gazing on the clock. Or any time, really.

“I’m more concerned about what we’re gonna find once we’re in there,” I said. “Frau Müller called the Bloodline project evil. I didn’t even know that word was in the corporate vocabulary.” Even Eiger had to nod at that.

With Paul as our eyes and ears, we easily stayed a step ahead of security, slipping in a side entrance and evading the Knight Errant patrols. We were soon in an elevator, descending into the bowels of the facility in KE uniforms we’d liberated from a storage locker. Mine smelled vaguely sour. Eiger’s was, against all logic, a little long.

Between Frau Müller’s supplied building schematics and Paul’s careful reading of the security info, it didn’t take long to home in on our target – the central lab in the deepest sub-basement. As we stepped out of the elevator, Dietrich seemed to stumble, catching himself on the wall. “Are you okay?” Glory asked, reaching for his shoulder. He patted her hand and straightened.

“I’m fine, love, it’s just…” He let out a breath. “This place was not built here by accident. Some high intensity ley lines converge here, not far from this spot. There is serious power flowing through this building. Just be aware of that.” Despite the close, barely recirculated air and heavy uniform, I felt a chill. We all nodded, and pushed on.

The generator room was accessible only through the lab, so we had no choice about our entrance. I’d been hoping against hope that it would be empty, but there was no such luck. Blitz sent one of his drones to peek around the corner into the lab area. “Six of ‘em, chief,” he said softly. “Looks like mages.”

“Then there’s probably additional security nearby,” Eiger said. “Be ready for this to get hot, fast.” 

“I’m still going to try to bluff my way through first,” I said, squaring my shoulders. “Watch my six.”

I strolled into the lab, effecting the rolling, unhurried, my-shift-ends-at-11 walk of security the world over. The mages stood around a cluster of computer terminals. To a one, they wore hooded red robes over their shirtsleeves and ties. (Corporate mages always look ridiculous.) “Can I help you?” the one nearest the door said.

“Just a routine check,” I replied. “Doing a sweep through here and the generator room and I’ll be out of your hair.”

His eyes narrowed dangerously. “I don’t recognize you.”

“Just transferred in.”

“Oh really.”

“What, are you wanting to check my ID or something?” I asked indignantly, hoping the show of irritation would force him into placating me. It didn’t work. 

An unpleasant smile oozed across his face. “I have a better idea.” He shoved back the sleeve of his robe, revealing a bare forearm. I stared at him in sick fascination as, in quick succession, he drew a knife from inside his robe, drew its point down the length of his forearm, and chanted a harsh, sharp phrase in a language I didn’t recognize. “Now tell me who you really are.”

I’ve never experienced that kind of pain before in my life. I’ve been shot, I’ve been stabbed, I’ve broken bones. Nothing could have prepared me for the intensity, the all-encompassing, world-altering truth of it. My entire body was gripped by it, a silent scream of blinding white agony that raked through me down to the bone. I sank to my knees, knowing, as surely as I knew anything, that all I had to do to make it stop was be honest with the man in front of me.

“DON’T YOU FUCKING DARE!”

The air crackled. I chanced, in my agony, to turn my head, and there in the doorway of the lab stood Dietrich, power wreathing him like a heat mirage, lightning in his hands. He extended his right, and electricity poured through him, straight for the Azzie mage. Suddenly the pain was gone, and the mage lay sprawled on his back, a smoking hole in his chest. 

Glory tore into the room, razors out, death in her eyes, and on her heels was Blitz’s favorite little Doberman drone. A rifle shot cracked; Eiger was in position. She and Glory had the easy rhythm of long time comrades – Glory got in close, Eiger kept her covered. 

Dietrich grabbed me, dragging me behind a console. “Hell of a light show,” I said shakily, trying not to show how rattled I was. He’d been so casual about it. How many times a day had that mage tortured some poor stiff just for looking at him wrong?

“They think they’ve got a monopoly on those ley lines?” Dietrich seized my face, peering at me closely. Giving my aura a once-over, probably. His eyes narrowed angrily, then he gave me a swift, hard hug. “It’s okay, love. Blood magic’s scary shit.” 

I sucked in a huge breath, and nodded tightly. “I’m solid, Dietrich.”

“Good.” He poked his head over the console, then said in a more conversational tone, “Looks like Glory’s having all the fun. Should we join her?”

In response, I popped up out of cover and squeezed off a spray of bullets aimed for a mage who’d tried to position himself behind a pillar out of Eiger’s line of sight. He staggered, robes fluttering, and Dietrich put him out of his misery with a single perfectly aimed knife to the throat.

As the last mage fell, my comm buzzed. “They’ve made us,” Paul reported. “The High Threat Response Team has been scrambled; you don’t have long to finish this.”

“We just need to get to the generators and overload them,” I replied, and started for the large set of double doors at the back of the room. Glory’s voice stopped me.

“Who are you?”

There were glass doors set into the walls of the lab, partitioning off tiny rooms. I hadn’t even noticed them before. She was standing in front of one, head tilted, and on the other side stood a haggard man, mirroring her stance. I drew closer, and saw that ‘haggard’ didn’t even begin to describe it. He was sallow, eyes bloodshot and sunken. The only real color to him were the massive and numerous bruises that covered every inch of visible skin, vivid and miserable. I looked around slowly, horror creeping through my veins. Behind every door stood the same man, head cocked, eyes wide. My skin threatened to crawl right off my body.

“Who are you?” he asked in reply. “You killed the Masters!”

“My name is Glory. Why are you here?”

“And why do you all look the same?” Blitz asked, looking uneasy.

“We don’t have time for this,” Eiger muttered to me.

“I’m a clone,” the man said matter-of-factly. The other clones nodded in agreement with this. “I can’t answer your other question, though. We were here to serve the will of the Masters, but they’re dead now.”

“What was their will?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” the clone said, shrugging. “It isn’t our place to know.”

“I see.”

“There were others like us,” he added. “Other groups of brothers. They would come here, the Masters would kill one of them, and all of them would die. I assume that was what was going to happen to us.” The other clones nodded again. Their nonchalance was disconcerting. My skin was running out of places to go. 

I scanned the lab, looking at the identical men in their identical cages. “Oh my God,” I murmured. “Groups of brothers. Project Bloodline. They were starting with clones, but…”

“Frau Müller was right,” Dietrich said softly. “This is evil.”

“Then let’s blow it to hell and get out of here!” Eiger was obviously losing her patience. 

“What about them?” Glory asked. “They’re innocents. We can’t leave them here.”

“Berlin would chew them up and ask for seconds. The world isn’t kind to the innocent, Glory.”

“It’s not kind to anyone,” I said, “but I agree with Glory anyway. Paul, have you been listening?”

“I have,” he said. “You need to get those generators overloaded and get out, Zee.”

“I know. But do you think you have any contacts who might be able to help these men?”

There was a thoughtful silence, then he said, “Likely. I’ll make some calls. While I do, _finish the job and get out_.”

I didn’t need any more encouragement. “Blitz! Get these doors open and make sure we’ve got a straight shot to the exit. Eiger, you’re with me. Let’s get those generators ready to blow. You two,” I said to Glory and Dietrich, “make sure nobody sneaks up on us.”

We split off, Eiger and I heading for the generator room on the other side of the double door. It only took a moment to upload the safety overrides and start the overload process. In my peripheral vision, I could see Blitz and Glory herding the confused clones towards the exit door, a reinforced airlock-style portal that could only be opened from the inside. “Zee!” Paul said urgently. “The response team!”

“Boss!” Dietrich shouted. “We got incoming!”

Blitz, Glory, and the clones were already out. Eiger and I charged back into the lab and she knocked over a workbench, crouching behind it with her rifle leveled. “I’ll cover you and Dietrich. We don’t have long now.” As if summoned by her words, an alarm began to wail.

Over the din, I heard shouts. The Knight Errant response team was close; the first pair of them dropped into cover positions on either side of the door. “Dietrich! Come on!” I yelled. He broke cover, zig-zagging as Eiger and the KE exchanged fire, the air alive with gun shots.

He was almost to us; I followed his progress with bated breath, the countdown to overload ticking on my comm. Light forming on his hands in some defensive magic, he half-turned to dive behind another workbench– 

-and dropped.

“Dietrich!” I scrambled for him, bullets whizzing over my head. The shot had caught him on the right side at the base of the rib cage. Shit. Wounds like that were nasty. The bullet could ricochet around on the bone, rip the organs to shreds. And we were almost out of time. “Dietrich? Stay with me, I’ve got to get you out of here.”

His breathing was shallow, wheezing, and there was nothing I could do for him. I didn’t have a medkit on me. Eiger did, but she might as well have been on the moon for all the good she could do us. And Glory, with her greater knowledge and skill, was already outside. I pressed my hands to his side, vainly trying to apply pressure. This was so wrong. This couldn’t possibly be how Dietrich Farber went out. This wasn’t his blaze of glory. This was stupid, and random, and meaningless. “Dietrich, listen to me. This isn’t how you die. Do you hear me?” 

There was a distinct wetness to the wheeze now. God, his lungs were probably filling with fluid. No, no, no, no, it couldn’t end like this. “Dragonslayer, he doesn’t die like this! He can’t! You know he can’t!” My throat was getting tight and I swallowed hard against it. “Dietrich, please.”

His eyes, fluttering and unfocused, suddenly snapped open wide, and he gasped, a huge tearing breath. A harsh, searing, golden light surrounded his left hand, which he slapped jerkily against his wounded side. He went limp, head lolling, and then his eyes opened, and fixed on me. 

“Zee? We’ve gotta get out of here.”

I’d never known the kind of pain that blood mage had inflicted on me. And I’d never known anything like the relief I felt in that moment, hearing Dietrich speak.

“Zee! Dietrich! MOVE!” Eiger roared. We rushed for the door, tearing up the steps and piling out into the narrow alley behind the facility. 

“Where the fuck have you been?” Blitz blurted. At least Glory and the clones seemed relatively unfazed. Eiger pointed towards the street with the muzzle of her rifle.

“Let’s go, people!”

My countdown beeped zero, and the ground shuddered. We made it up the block and around the next, putting more structures between us and the blast, and just in time. Steel screamed and masonry shattered, and everything touched by Project Bloodline vanished in dust and rubble. Everything except the five of us, and the six brothers looking up at the night sky with confusion and wonder. My comm buzzed.

“Zee? Is it done?” Paul asked.

“It’s done, Paul.”

I could hear his sigh of relief, and in my mind’s eye, I saw him taking off his glasses and closing his eyes. “And everyone is alright?”

I glanced at Dietrich. Glory was poking curiously at his bloody shirt, examining his side and its lack of bullet holes. “Yeah, we’re fine.” 

A wail of sirens, and the thrum of rotorcraft filled the air. “Time to retreat, Zee,” Eiger said. “Before they shut down the district.”

“What about our new friends?”

“Put them on the U-Bahn to Tempelhof,” Paul said. “I have an acquaintance there, a shaman of the Great Mother, who’s agreed to take them in the short term until a better solution can be found.” I watched Eiger as we hustled the clones toward the U-Bahn station. I'd expected the humanitarian angle this run had taken to not be to her taste, given what she'd said, but she caught my eye, and there was something like respect in hers. It felt good, as we put distance between us and the crater that had contained a horror show. We shed our stolen uniforms and vanished into the night, as all good shadowrunners do, and went home to enjoy our reward.


	10. The Punk Code

Paul was waiting for us at the safehouse, and we were all too still busy processing what we’d just seen and done to really register how cheerful he looked. “Welcome home!” he said.

“Thank God,” I said, flopping on the couch. Dante hopped up beside me, forgetting as usual that he wasn’t a lap dog. “What a night.”

“Apparently Frau Müller was impressed,” Paul said, and that was when I noticed the smile on his face. “We’ve already received payment.”

“Damn,” Blitz said. He sat next to me and reached over to scratch Dante’s head. “Was she camped out down the block or something?”

Eiger sat in her big chair and started to take off her boots. “Probably. I don’t blame her for keeping tabs. Still, it’s nice to not have to wrangle payment out of a client for once.”

“That it is, but this is even more momentous than that, my friends.” And that was when I noticed the bottle and six glasses sitting on the kitchen island. “After individual shares, Frau Müller’s payment is sufficient to bring us to our goal of fifty thousand nuyen. We can pay Alice now.”

It took a second for that to sink in. Then Eiger brought her fist down on the arm of her chair with a triumphant shout, Blitz punched the air, Glory applauded, and I yelled, “Then open that bottle, Amsel!” Even Dante, not wanting to be left out, howled happily. Paul complied, beaming, and we drank up, letting the festive air drive away the ghosts of Aztechnology.

But Dietrich looked distracted. He stood against the far wall thoughtfully, looking past all of us, his eyes far away. He didn’t even take a drink, which was completely unlike him. I approached him, leaving the others to their celebration. “Hey,” I said, touching his hand, “something wrong?”

He looked at my hand, covering his. The old Chinese preference was for neat, small appendages, and in that one regard, I’d come through for my ancestors. His, though, were wide and broad-boned, the better to punch you with, and he’d obviously laid down plenty of those in his time. His knuckles were rough and permanently swollen with scar tissue, the tendons standing stark against the skin. I still liked them. Dietrich wouldn’t be Dietrich without hands like those. 

“Can we talk? Privately?”

This was unusual. “Sure.” I let him lead me into his room.

I’d never been in his room before, and I’m not sure what I’d imagined. It was larger than mine, but such are the perks of seniority. Two whole walls were taken up with bracketed shelving filled with a bewildering array of objects – paper books heaped together in no discernible order, various types of audio media (I swear I saw a stack of honest-to-God vinyl records), ritual foci, summoning talismans, interesting empties he’d collected. It looked like absolute chaos, but I was sure he could probably find anything he wanted in an instant. Another wall was dominated by his bed (also bigger than mine) and a chest of drawers, and the fourth was covered in old concert posters (I spotted multiples for MESSERKAMPF!) and a map of the London Underground. 

He still wasn’t really looking at me, and I was getting concerned. “Dietrich, what’s up?”

He pulled at his shirt, twisting it slightly to look at the bullet hole and the blood. “You said that wasn’t how I died.”

So he’d been conscious enough to understand me after all. “Well, it’s not,” I said. “It couldn’t be. You’re a servant of the Dragonslayer! Your entire life has been about sticking a big middle finger in the face of power. Fuck authority, remember? Some random Knight Errant goon doesn’t get to end that with a lucky shot. When you die, it’s going to mean something.”

He chuckled a little. “So you’re dabbling in prophecy now?”

“Yeah right. Besides, you obviously agreed with me, seeing as you healed yourself.”

“That’s the thing, _Liebchen_ …I didn’t do that.”

“Yeah you did. I saw you do it.”

“No, Zee,” he said, raising his eyes with a significant look on his face. “ _ **I**_ didn’t.”

“Then what-” _Dragonslayer, he doesn’t die like this!_ “Oh.”

The corner of his mouth pulled in a wry smile. “I think Dragonslayer may like you almost as much as I do.”

I smiled back. “Tell Him He can buy me a drink some time.”

“Are you flirting with my idol?”

“Jealous?”

He rolled his eyes, still smiling at me. And it was just so perfectly _us_ – Zee and Dietrich, our dynamic, our thing. Which was probably why I put my hand to the back of his head and pressed my lips to his.

A key lesson of shadowrunning is always be ready for anything when you open a door. You never know what could be on the other side. But that’s a lesson with a wider application. We certainly weren’t entirely prepared for what was waiting for us on the other side of this door.

For a little less than half a second, it was merely a friendly, affectionate gesture. Then his head tilted, his hands found my waist, my arms twined around his neck, and friendly and affectionate got left in the dust. Our bodies pressed together, our tongues tangled. And what surprised me the most was that I wasn't surprised at all. Rather than being dismayed at being cast adrift on a roaring sea, the analytical part of my mind shrugged and opined that this all made perfect sense. We’d never just been friends. We’d been drawn to each other from the beginning. There’d always been an energy, nameless and only partially acknowledged, coloring the white spaces in our relationship, that thing I'd let myself write off as maybe attraction. This was no maybe. It was a Yes; full-throated, unhesitating, absolute. Now everything was perfectly clear, illuminated in the light of a singular truth, and I knew it for what it was: Desire. And not just a why not, one-off, might be fun kind of desire. This demanded, this ached. I was recklessly, desperately hungry for him. I wanted him. NOW. And he obviously wanted me, so - 

He dropped his hands and took a step back, breathing hard. A look of guilt flickered across his face. “Zee,” he whispered miserably, “I’m old enough to be your father.”

And there it was. The thing we hadn’t been saying, the thing we’d been avoiding. That was the line we’d dancing right on the edge of, and now, finally having lunged over it, it was ready with a cold, wet slap of reality. But hearing it said aloud finally gave me the words to express how I felt about it. 

“So?” I crossed my arms sourly. “I don’t know if I should be insulted or not. You think I’m just working through daddy issues here or something?” He looked as if he were about to object, but I was on a roll and there was no stopping me now. “I mean, maybe if we were good little wage slaves with SINs and corp IDs, maybe if marriage and kids and promotions and keeping up with the Schmidts was the end game here, the fact that you’re twenty years older than me might actually mean something. MAYBE. But that’s not how our lives work. All we have is what we take for ourselves. And right now, what I want to take is you, and if you don’t want me, then you have been sending some massively mixed signals.”

“Of course I want you,” he muttered, looking persecuted.

“Then I don’t see the problem. Honestly, the only reason I can think of for you to even bring up your age is that you’re worried you can’t get it up. And if that’s the case, I’m sorry, but I still can’t let you off the hook, because you still have a tongue and two working hands.”

He stared at me, and I couldn’t read his face at all. Which was probably the most disconcerting thing I’d seen all evening. I hadn’t realized how accustomed I’d become to knowing what he was thinking, just from looking at him, and now - nothing. He stared at me, in silence, unreadable, for so long I feared I’d gone too far. And just when I was wondering how I could possibly salvage this, a pugnacious smile stole over his lips. “You callin’ me out?”

There he was. There was my Dietrich. I dropped my hands to my hips and cocked my chin in challenge. “Looks like. What are you gonna do about it?”

The smile spread, a mischievous light sparkling in his eyes, and then he tackled me, right onto the bed. We grappled briefly, laughing, and I was positive I could slither out of his grasp, get him under me, really show him who was boss – 

And he had me pinned, holding my wrists on either side of my head. He had me beat on upper body strength, so I was going to have to be clever. I wrapped my legs around the backs of his thighs; the plan was to use my weight to roll him over, but he was onto me. He shook his head in mock disappointment. “That all you got, love?”

I made a brief, heroic show of struggle. His answering grin was infectious, and he released my wrists, his hands sliding under my shirt as he kissed me, his tongue parting my lips. My back arched at his touch, and the way he was pressing against me made it obvious my dig about not getting it up had been misdirected, which just made it worse. “You fucking tease,” I gasped in a pause for breath. 

He dragged his mouth away from mine, working his way up my jaw. “Oh, so you wanna be teased, huh?" He ground against me purposefully, his breath hot in my ear. My whole body was screaming for him, and I bucked my hips against his defiantly.

“You afraid of the main event, punk?” I challenged. He laughed.

"Never."

We wrestled each other out of our clothes, every shed article a triumph. What had started as a competition was turning into a team event, our joint goal to be as thorough with each other as possible, in every sense of the word. We didn’t tenderly explore each other’s bodies; we grabbed, we clawed, we claimed. We didn’t gently make love, we _fucked_. And it was glorious. It was loud, it was raucous, and it was punk as hell. I was his, and he was mine, and we were going to take what belonged to us.

He was on top when he came, and his eyes lit up. I don’t mean that metaphorically – they literally glowed with a supernatural light, blue-tinged gold sweeping over them. He sagged against me, catching his breath. “I think Dragonslayer liked that too,” he chuckled into my ear. Something suddenly clicked, a realization that made me want to dissolve into giggles, but I would have to test the theory first. Besides, my body was still coming down from the series of really first-class orgasms I’d just had, and luxuriating in the proximity of the man who’d helped me to them. I was little disappointed when he rolled off onto his back beside me. But now I could ask my question. Carefully, of course.

“Been a while,” I said. “Hope I wasn’t too rusty, but it’s been at least six months. Probably longer. How about you?”

His brow furrowed in thought. “It’s been…” Slowly his eyes widened as he did the math. “Shit. It’s been nearly four years!” He shook his head. “How the hell did that happen?”

“Time got away from you?” I suggested innocently.

He stared at the ceiling thoughtfully. “I think I really was starting to believe I was old,” he mused. “You know, I’ve always tried to live my life by the punk code: Get loud, get lit, get laid. Looks like I’d been neglecting that last part.” He sighed, then glanced at me suspiciously. “Was that question a comment on the performance?”

I rolled my eyes. “Dietrich, I’m going to have to pass out handwritten apology notes tomorrow about the noise. Do you really think I was faking that?” He looked mollified, and a little pleased. “It does explain some things, though.” I told him about my experience the night of Monika’s death. He cocked his head, his fascination tinged with surprise.

“You had a vision of us kissing that night?”

“Not just kissing,” I corrected. “There were hands involved. But it’s more than that.” I ticked off my examples on my fingers. “I was able to see your memories of the Night of Rage. There was what happened the night of the Humanis run. And there was tonight. I think I’ve finally figured out what’s been going on.” I ran my hand over his right side, where the gunshot wound had been, and where now there was only the faint puckering of a small, fresh scar. “It’s the Dragonslayer. It’s not necessarily that He likes me as much as you do. I think He’s just trying to be a good wingman.”

He stared at me for a second, unblinking, then snapped his eyes shut. He lay there silently, a look of strained concentration on his face, and I got the feeling I was witnessing the shamanistic equivalent of a ‘What the fuck, man?!’ conversation. It was getting harder and harder not to laugh, then his eyes opened. “Jesus,” he groaned, and that was when I broke. He covered his face with his hands while I laughed. “This is embarrassing,” he said, voice muffled.

“Why?” I pried his hands away. 

“My idol had to intervene to get me laid!”

“Dragonslayer may have talked you up, but you were the one who sealed the deal.” I glanced at my right arm, where a bite mark was starting to bloom on my bicep. “Pretty forcefully at that.” That impish light started to kindle in his eyes again.

“You liked that, huh?”

“Again – noise level. You tell me.”

We shared a ‘Yeah, we really just did that’ grin, then his smile softened. He cupped my cheek, brushing my skin with his thumb. “So I guess we’re doin’ this May-December thing?” he asked.

“More like May-October, really, but…” I shifted, reclining and resting my head on his chest. He wrapped his arms around me, seemingly without even thinking about it. “I’m game if you are. I like this, Dietrich. It feels real.”

“Yeah, it does,” he agreed softly. We lay together quietly, his hand idly stroking my shoulder. “I can do something about the bruises, if you want,” he offered. I laughed.

“I came by those honestly, thank you very much. Besides, if I were you, I’d be more worried about what I did to your back.”

He snorted. “That? That’s nothing. You barely broke the skin. I got shot tonight, love. You’re gonna have to sharpen your claws if you wanna make an impression.” I smiled and stretched my neck to press my lips to the hollow of his throat, just below the ear. He closed his eyes with a sigh of pleasure. 

“I suppose we could go easier on each other next time,” I said.

“We could.”

“If only to change it up.”

“Exactly.”

Shadowrunners have sex. It can be hard to avoid in the close confines of teams who have to trust each other with their lives, emotions and hormones running high. But not all of those hook-ups predicate a next time. I’d certainly had my share of those, and it went without saying that Dietrich had too. But this felt real, like a first time, not an only. Of course there would be a next time. It was a given, and neither of us questioned it. That was probably why there was also no question of where I’d spend the night. It didn’t even occur to me to get up and go back to my room. Not when I could settle against Dietrich’s side, and fall asleep beside him.

I woke up before he did, and rooted around on the floor for my discarded clothes. Last night’s panties had not survived their removal from my body, so I shrugged on my trousers commando and grabbed the nearest shirt I could find. Turned out it was one of Dietrich’s (no wonder it seemed big), but I didn’t realize that until I was out in the common, confronted with Glory’s smiling face.

She sat at the kitchen island, her teacup comically tiny in her hands. And she looked smug. I’d never seen that much expression on her face before. It was unnerving. “Nice shirt,” she said.

“Thanks.”

“Have a good night?”

So this was how it was going to be. No point in playing games, then. “I did. Because Dietrich and I had sex.” 

“Oh, I know.” She took a sip.

“Let me guess – you’re the welcoming committee?”

“We took a vote last night. Eiger and Blitz still aren’t sure they can look you in the face. Paul’s mainly excited about his winnings.”

“His what.” It wasn’t really a question. 

“Well, we had a pool going and Paul won.”

“You were betting on if Dietrich and I would have sex? And PAUL won?”

“Not if. When.”

“Oh my God.” I covered my face, just long enough to breath for a ten count. “Can I at least change clothes before the ritual humiliation?”

“That seems fair. I’ll put some tea on for you.”

“You’re too kind.”

Shadowrunners have sex. And if you keep it discreet, you may avoid the worst of the inevitable teasing and the earnest conversations about team dynamics. We had not been remotely discreet, so we had earned the full weight of our crew’s mocking and trepidation. I washed up, put on fresh clothes, brushed my hair, and squared my shoulders. Time to have my tea and take my medicine.

The others had joined Glory, including Dietrich, who noticed my entrance gratefully. “There she is,” Eiger said. “Well, first things first.” She withdrew a credstick from her pocket and extended it to Paul. “For you, Herr Amsel. Enjoy your victory.” Glory and Blitz likewise made great ceremony of handing over their losses, and Paul accepted them magnanimously. Dietrich and I shot each other martyred looks. She then turned her attention to us, arms crossed, looking stern. I braced myself for the speech.

“First: Looks like I was right,” she said. “Second: Next time, keep it down.”


	11. White Rabbit

Credsticks are credsticks, but this one seemed heavier than most. Paul smiled at me as I gingerly accepted it from him. “It seems like it should be different somehow,” he said. “Gold-plated, perhaps?”

I tucked it into an inner pocket of my jacket, a thousand awful scenarios ranging from pickpockets to getting hit in the chest to spontaneous combustion all flooding through me at the same time. “I don’t know if that would be better or worse.” I took a deep breath, drawing myself up to my full and not considerable height. “Wish me luck.”

“Of course. _Bon chance_ , as they say.” 

I smiled, and was about to leave when he added, “When Monika first told me you’d be joining us here in Berlin, I asked her why. She said, ‘I could always count on Zee to come through in the clutch. She was my ace in the hole.’ I see now what she meant by that. I’m not sure anyone else could have kept this team together the way you have. Thank you for that.”

“Thank you?” I repeated, puzzled.

“These people, this work…they mean a great deal to me, Zee. I used to fear our success could not survive Monika. That was a misplaced fear, and I’m glad to be wrong about it.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling oddly self-conscious. “Well, you’re welcome, I think. I guess I do kinda feel like I’ve found my footing here.”

“Good,” he said. “I’ll see you soon.”

“Absolutely. Bye, Paul.”

Dietrich was loitering outside the shop as I exited, the last slanting rays of the setting sun striping the wall above his head. “Thought I’d walk you to the station,” he said, pushing himself off from the wall. There was something about the movement – maybe it was the way he braced his arms, or the motion of his hips – that stabbed me with a spike of jealousy towards every woman who’d gotten to have a piece of that before I came along. I stuffed it down, and instead smiled as he fell into step beside me. 

“You really are a gentleman. That doesn’t hurt your punk cred, does it?”

“Any cred based on bein’ an asshole isn’t worth having.”

We walked shoulder to shoulder; close, but not quite touching. “Can I admit something?” I asked.

“Of course.”

“I’m a little nervous about this.”

“I get that. That credstick represents a lot of time and toil.”

“It’s not just that. Ignorance is bliss, you know? I have no idea what Alice is going to give us, but whatever it is, we’ve got to follow it all the way down. Or up.”

He nodded. “We’ll know what we’re up against. Or at least have a better idea.”

“That’s the scary part.”

He put his hand on my forearm, stopping me. “Zee, love,” he said gently, “you noticed that I said ‘we’, right? You’re not having to do this alone, and don’t give me some lonely-at-the-top bullshit. Eiger may be into that drek, but you know I’m not. As a crew, as a team, we decided we were going to do this, and we’re all going to bear it together.”

I ducked my head, suddenly not quite able to look him in the eye. As is my habit, I covered my self-consciousness with humor. “That was a good pep talk. Ever think about going into motivational speaking?” I shot him an innocent glance. Laugh, dammit.

Instead he squinted speculatively. “You know, I got into shadowrunning because I told myself I was tired of putting on a show. Maybe the show just changed.”

A realization struck me, hearing him say that. “But it wasn’t really a show, was it? Just a bigger version of you. Because from where I’m standing, I see a guy who’s always completely honest about who he is, and I get the feeling that was just as true twenty years ago as it is now.” I smiled a little. “That’s what I like best about you.”

An answering smile, small and almost shy, pulled at his lips. He took my hands in his. “Eiger wasn’t right. No matter what she says.”

I dismissed it with a shrug. “She was mad at me when she said what she did before, and this morning, she was giving us shit. It’s fine.”

“It is, but still. It was never like this with me and Monika. Not even close.” 

“I know.”

“Good, but I don’t just mean the sex. You’re nobody’s replacement. You’re not a stand-in, or a substitute. You’re _you_. And you’re fantastic. And as for you’n’me...” His voice trailed off, and he shrugged. “Well, I’d take a bullet for you. In a heartbeat.”

“I’ve seen you take a bullet. I’m not in a hurry to repeat that experience.”

He chuckled softly. “You’re a hell of a woman, Zee. You deserve to know that. You deserve...everything, really.”

Shit, was I blushing? What the hell, face?

“So go settle up with Alice, find out what’s at the end of this road we’re on, and then later you and I can...debrief.” 

I groaned. “Oh, that was bad.”

“You’re smiling.”

“I said it was bad. I didn’t say it wasn’t funny.”

He grinned hugely at me, then glanced around furtively and tilted my chin to raise my face to his. He kissed me, soft and seeking, all loose lips and agile tongue, and suddenly I couldn’t envy my sexual predecessors, because it had taken a lot of practice to get that good. 

“That your way of saying hurry back?” I murmured.

“Hurry back, be careful, good luck…all of it.”

“I like that. Very economical.” 

We shared a parting smile, and I boarded the train for Altstadt Spandau station with a spring in my step. We might just make it through this thing after all.

The eerie silence of the abandoned station managed to puncture my good cheer just a fraction. Places meant for crowds never feel right when they’re empty. My footsteps echoed oddly as I approached the archaic video game machine Alice used as the portal between herself and her clients. I withdrew the credstick and took a deep breath. Last call for ignorance. Time for knowledge. I slotted the stick.

Alice’s face appeared on the screen. “I wasn’t sure you’d be back,” she said. 

I peered at her image. The first time I’d been here, she’d looked so polished and put together. Now she seemed…harried. Nonplussed. Afraid. A chill ran down my spine.

“I have your information, Zee,” she continued, “and I will give it to you, because that was our agreement, but if you want my advice, you’ll drop this and walk away.”

I found my voice. “What does that mean?”

“It means if you value your life, you’ll get out of Berlin. Now, if possible.” The arcade machine whirred, and an optical chip plinked to the ground at my feet. The sound was impossibly loud, and I started. “There. Our business is concluded.” She looked as if she were about to terminate the connection, then said, urgently, “Stay out of the Matrix. It isn’t safe.”

The screen went blank.

My fingers trembled slightly as I reached for the chip. Get out of Berlin? Stay out of the Matrix? What the hell had we stumbled into? 

I hurried back to the train, and tried to let its steady rhythm sooth me, but it didn’t work. The thought of Alice’s strained face haunted me. She had been _frightened_. Whatever she had learned, on our behalf, terrified her. Suddenly Dietrich’s words of encouragement seemed very far away.

My comm buzzed, and seeing that it was Paul, I answered it. Maybe he could tell me something to ease my mind.

But it wasn’t Paul’s face that greeted me. Instead there was the face of a nightmare, misshapen, twisted, ugly in flesh and soul. Audran, the orc who’d mocked us at Harfeld Manor the night Monika died, who’d led the security charge we’d barely fled from with our lives. I would have known that face, that voice, again in an instant. There was no mistaking it for anyone else. And he was in our home.

Alone on the U-Bahn, somewhere under Charlottenburg, I watched Paul Amsel die.


	12. Requiem

That was the longest train ride of my life.

A clenched fist of rage and grief and fear gripped my insides, twisting cruelly with every breath. I realized at one point I was gripping the seat rail so hard my hands had gone numb, and I forced myself to let go. I had to think. Had to collect my thoughts. Had to get to my shit together. 

Here were the facts: Paul was dead, killed by Audran, who was apparently the Firewing’s enforcer. The circumstantial evidence seemed to point to that, anyway. He hadn’t been alone, either. I’d seen others in the background, heard Audran giving orders. Which meant the Kreuzbasar itself was likely under attack. And my comm was jammed, so I couldn’t even raise the rest of the crew. I was alone. Cut off. Helpless. Useless.

How had they found us?

Finally, after what felt like centuries, the U-Bahn train slowed, entering the Kreuzbasar station. Even before the doors opened, it was obvious something was wrong. The lights were dim, the air smoky. I checked my weapon, and carefully exited onto the platform.

“ZEE!”

It was Eiger. She’d ripped up a couple of the platform benches, throwing them into a makeshift barricade. 

“Eiger! Paul is-”

“I know,” she said shortly. “He was broadcasting to all of us.”

In a way, that was strangely comforting. At least I didn’t have to bear those awful images alone.

“I don’t know where the others are,” she continued, her voice clipped and terse. “When I realized what had happened, I knew you would be a target as well.” She shot me a sidelong look, her pale blue eyes tight. Behind the soldier’s mask, behind the risk calculations and objective checklists, I could see the fury and frustration, flickering like an old neon sign. They’d come for our kiez, and there was absolutely no time to dwell on that. I nodded, trying to keep myself centered. If we survived, we could fall apart later. Not now.

“Good thinking,” I said. “Let’s go.”

She swept up the steps out of the station, and I followed hard on her heels. It was fully dark by now, and only a handful of the streetlamps were on. Flames danced ahead of us, pouring oily smoke skyward. The sounds I’d come to associate with a Kreuzbasar evening – conversation, distant music, the rustle of passing metahumanity – were gone. Now there was gunfire, shouts, and fear in the air. “Who’s there?” challenged a voice. It seemed familiar.

The barrel of a shotgun emerged from the shadows gathered around the doors to Samuel’s, and then its wielder stepped into view. “Oh, thank God, Zee,” Alexander said, lowering his weapon.

“Alex,” I asked urgently, “have you seen your uncle?” He shook his head.

“He came by earlier, but he was already gone by the time this started.” His gun shook slightly in his hands. “What the hell is going on, Zee? They were shooting through the doors at us! There are old people and little kids here!”

Elderly orcs and baby trolls, anyway. Dietrich had been right; he really did just need his horizons broadened.

“We’re not sure yet,” I said, telling a version of the truth. “Stay here. We’re going to stop this.”

“Shoot straight, kid,” Eiger said, giving him a professional nod. He returned it tightly, and returned to his shadowy alcove.

We rounded a corner, hugging the walls, nerves stretched tight. The sound of a keening howl plucked them like violin strings, sounded a note that sang panic down to the soles of our feet. “Shit,” I whispered. “They have a hellhound?”

A dark shape tore out of the smoke ahead of us, its eyes glowing like coals, heat rippling from its open maw. The hellhound raised its head, then suddenly stopped, as if something had changed its mind. It bounded towards me, but before I could get a bead on it, I noticed it was wagging its tail.

The hellhound woofed happily, prancing in a canine hello, and my jaw dropped. “Dante?” He whined in reply, sniffing at my hands. I had to jerk them back to keep from being on the receiving end of accidental third degree burns. 

“Of course,” Eiger muttered. “ _Dante_. Monika probably thought she was so fucking clever.”

A rattle of gunfire sounded to our left, and an explosion rocked the ground beneath us. Eiger’s nostrils flared. “Not powder or cordite,” she said. “Ozone. That was Dietrich.”

Dante threw back his head and howled, but now the sound wasn’t fearful. If anything, I wanted to bay right along with him. I wanted to raise my voice in defiance of the invaders. I wanted to tear their flesh and crack their bones. I wanted to protect my territory, my pack, and the glint in Eiger’s eyes told me she felt the same. We charged.

There were three of them, and they had Dietrich cornered, but he didn’t look worried. A fourth was already dead at his feet, and a sneering smile twisted his lips. In one hand, he held a knife, lightly balanced for a toss, and the other was wreathed in sparks. He got sight of us, over his attackers’ heads, and the smile got downright nasty. He loosed his knife and dropped, rolling to keep low as Eiger and I opened fire. One of them broke to flee; Dante leapt after him and instructed him in his error. 

Dietrich climbed to his feet, dusting himself off. The smile was gone, now he just looked tired and relieved. “You saw what happened to Paul,” he said. I nodded, suddenly not trusting myself to speak. He leaned close and rested his forehead against mine. The contact only lasted an instant, but for that second, the world was still and I felt like I could breathe again. 

He stepped back, and looked at Eiger. “Blitz is with Maliit. He found me right before the shooting started – said they were going to try to return the favor with the comms. And I think it worked, because this bunch got real confused right before you showed up. I dunno about Glory. But in her case, just look for the disembowelings.”

He wasn’t wrong about that. We found the first of her victims about a hundred meters north, curled in a futile attempt to keep from bleeding out. I almost could have felt sorry for her, except for what she’d been here to do. Dante sniffed at the body, then snorted in seeming disgust. There was another a little further north, and then another. “She was falling back,” Eiger said, her steps quickening, “looking for a defensive position.” Dante howled again, and Dietrich, unexpectedly but also unsurprisingly, joined him. Eiger shot them A Look, then said, “Yeah, I’m done with this shit too.”

Glory had done just as Eiger had said, falling back to the park on the northern edge of the kiez, where she could force her attackers into a bottleneck and keep them from rushing her. Eiger looked proud as she swung her rifle back onto her shoulder and reached for her shotgun in its back holster. They were easy pickings, all lined up like that, only we didn’t care about easy. Just revenge.

When it was over, Glory retracted her razors. “Audran’s already gone,” she said. “I heard them trying to confirm it, but apparently their comms were out.”

“Good boy, Blitz,” Dietrich murmured. 

“So this was just the clean-up crew,” Eiger said, her lip curling. 

“Actually, I think that’s us,” I replied. My chest physically hurt at the sight of the devastation around me, the fist first clenched on the train now squeezing so hard I could barely breathe. Only now the fear was gone, and I was left with blinding fury and dark grief swirling together so fast it was giving me vertigo. Dietrich carefully put his hand on my shoulder, steadying me. I checked my magazine and said, “Let’s make sure we’ve tidied them all up.”

There were a few pockets of resistance, the stragglers who hadn’t withdrawn yet, and now they’d never get the chance. Eiger kicked over the last body, shaking her head. “There is serious money behind this. These aren’t some sketchy, fly-by-night gun thugs. This is a legitimate outfit Audran’s put together.”

“Paul did say he’d found evidence of there being investors in whatever project is ongoing at Harfeld,” Glory said. It hurt, just a little, hearing his name.

“Why does a dragon need investors?” Dietrich asked, not for the first time. Eiger pursed her lips.

“Hopefully Alice had some answers for us.”

I pressed my hand to the pocket containing the optical chip. It felt even heavier than the credstick had. “Yeah.”

Slowly, the kiez was shaking off the shock, stirring cautiously to see if the danger was past. Bucket brigades formed to put out fires, small clusters of debris clearing broke out, people tended to their neighbors’ wounds. Guilt, like a rusty knife, twisted in my gut looking at them. They looked so lost, so stunned. This wasn’t supposed to happen here. The Kreuzbasar was supposed to be safe. It was supposed to be different.

The image of Audran’s deformed face rose in my memory, sneering at the good man he was about to murder, and mentally, I ripped out the knife. I would buy back the Kreuzbasar’s safety with his blood. The bodies of the innocent, covered with sheets and tarps, were on his head, and he and the Firewing would pay for every drop of blood shed tonight.

“Fuck yes, they’ll pay,” Dietrich said, for my ears only. I wondered if it was easier for him to read my aura now that we’d slept together. That could be both a good thing and a bad thing.

Blitz was waiting for us outside Reine Neugier (the sign had been smashed, and I added that to the list of Audran’s crimes). There were bullet holes in his coat, and soot smudges on his face. He was shifting his weight anxiously, and didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. “You’re all okay,” he said, catching sight of us. “I uh...” He gave a little, helpless, humorless laugh. “I couldn’t go in. Not by myself.”

“Just as well,” I told him. “We need to do this together.”

The door swung loosely, unlatched, but before I could push it open, Dietrich said, “Wait.” He withdrew his flask from his jacket, unstoppered it, and upended it over the threshold. As one, we watched the liquor splash onto the pavement. None of us spoke; it didn’t seem appropriate to until the last drop was gone. 

The interior of the shop was still and dark and the smell of death was overpowering. Glory hit the lights, and I braced myself for what I was about to see. 

Let’s get this out of the way: I’ve killed people, and I’ve seen people die, and I haven’t bothered to keep a running count of either, because quite frankly, that way lies madness. But just when you think you’re used to it, just when you think the sight of a dead body can’t hurt you anymore, it’s one of your friends, and then it’s like the first time all over again. Paul lay on his side, what was left of his face mercifully turned away from us. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Dietrich stoop to pick something up – Paul’s glasses, blown from his face by the gunshot that killed him. He grimaced slightly as he straightened, and tucked them into his pocket. Dante, whose eyes and fiery muzzle had returned to normal, whimpered sadly, and the sound helped me to finally find my voice.

“I don’t know what tradition Paul kept, so I don’t know which words are the right ones, but…he was the most decent man I’ve ever met.”

“The best,” Glory murmured.

Blitz was back to doing that nervous thing with his hands, stuffing them into his pockets, removing them, then repeating the cycle. “I didn’t know him as well as you guys, but he sure acted like he gave a shit about me, so…”

“I let him down,” Eiger said, almost to herself. “I was out of position. I should have been here.”

“You would have died too,” Glory said.

“He wouldn’t have died alone!”

Her outburst renewed the silence. Blitz stared at a spot on the floor, and I patted Dante’s head, in lieu of anything else to do. Glory seemed to crumple, just a fraction, and Dietrich-

“Did you know his drink of choice was vodka?” Dietrich asked suddenly. “The good Russian shit.” Eiger stared at him. “Monika and I took him to this bar in Mitte once. I don’t remember the occasion. I think we both had him pegged for a white wine man, but he ordered a vodka shot, and ripped it off like a pro, on the inhale. Not so much as a cough. ‘Course, after six or seven of those, he was up on a table singing Billy Idol’s ‘Dancing with Myself’. Knew every word.”

We all let that image sink in. Eiger blinked once, very slowly, then snorted with laughter. Her shoulders shook, and though she tried to stifle the laugh behind her fingers, it slipped out anyway. “Are you shitting me?” she demanded, wiping her eyes between chuckles.

“God’s honest truth. He wasn’t half bad, actually. Better than me, but that’s not hard.” The room suddenly seemed a little warmer, less foreboding and dark. Eiger straightened her shoulders. 

“I’ll deal with the body,” she said.

“That’s a good idea,” Dietrich said gently. “Just remember, it’s only a shell now.” She nodded, and he glanced down at the body at his feet. “Go with God, my friend.”

“Do what you have to, Eiger,” I said. “I think we all need to try and get some rest tonight.” As tempting as it might be to immediately plow through Alice’s intel, we were all too exhausted and strung-out to really comprehend it. Everyone nodded, and Eiger bent to lift Paul’s body. He seemed so small now.

None of us asked her where she was going or what she intended to do. We gave the shop a cursory tidying, focused mainly on getting the blood and brains out of the floor and walls. There would be more to do, but not tonight. Glory and Blitz quietly retired to their own rooms, which left Dietrich and me alone again. A part of me wanted to go straight to his room and his bed, but that seemed awfully presumptuous. We’d had sex a grand total of once; it was absurd to assume that I was now automatically welcome in his space at every occasion. He probably wanted to be alone tonight. We all had a lot to process, and he’d known Paul far longer than I had.

He looked at me expectantly. “Comin’ to bed?”

Yes. God yes.

There wasn’t anything to say once the door was closed. He sat on the edge of the bed and I sat next to him, leaning against his side. I’m not sure how long we sat there in silence, until I felt him turn his head to kiss my buzzed hair just above my datajack, and I shivered, welcoming the touch. He kissed me again, nearer my ear, and I turned to meet his lips with mine.

It was a good start, but I wasn’t close enough. I needed to be closer to him. I twisted, swinging my leg over his to face him, trying desperately not to lose either my balance or the kiss in the process. He pulled me hard against him, his hands resting warm against the small of my back. We parted, eyes locked. Honesty hung in the air between us, but it didn’t need any words. I hadn’t known what to do the openness, the simple _truth_ of the night he’d shared Dragonslayer’s favor with me, but I did now.

Carefully, I disentangled myself from him, standing so that I could undress. It wasn’t a striptease, it wasn’t about lust, just…being naked. Being honest. He watched, a silent mix of appreciation and understanding in his eyes, and when I was done, he stood and did likewise.Then it was just us, no pretense or falsehood. He gently took my face in his hands, scarred and rough and perfect, and kissed me, a slow burn kiss, deep and unhurried. I slid my arms around him, savoring the sensation of skin on skin. We had no reason to hide, no need to pretend, nothing to fight against, nothing to run from. The tumult of the past few hours slid away, and everything was okay. 

His hands skimmed down my sides, and there was something reverent about his touch, as if my skin was sacred. We slowly maneuvered back onto the bed, deliberate in every movement, mindful of each other, trying not to rush. I’d never been so aware of my body, of the flutter in my pulse, the catch in my breath, the electric spark of every single nerve ending. But eclipsing even that was the awareness of him. We were two separate bodies, but I’m not sure I could tell you where one ended and the other began. I watched his face as we moved together, poring over it, studying it - the variegation of lighter and darker brown in the irises of his eyes, the laugh lines around them, the stylized crescent tattoos on his forehead, the creases around his generous mouth, the scars that were the proud trophies of a life lived on his own terms. In our shared gaze, I knew we were thinking the same thing: _I’m so glad I met you. So glad you’re with me right now. So glad you wanted me too._

“You’ll like Dietrich,” Monika had said. “He’s the best.”

Oh, Monika. If you only knew.

“I needed that,” I said in the stillness afterward.

“That was the point,” he said quietly.

I understood then. Pouring out libation for Paul’s spirit on the threshold, getting Eiger to laugh, the breathtakingly intimate sex – it had been psychic house-cleaning, driving away the death brought to our doorstep with acts of life. “So that was a shaman thing?” I asked, tracing the pentacle tattoo over his left pec.

“Kinda, and...I needed it too.”

I paused in my tracing. “I’m glad I could help, then. Are you okay?”

“I will be. It’s just one of those nights when you feel like you’ve seen too many good people die, and not enough of the other kind.” 

It was exactly one of those nights. I pressed myself closer to him, resting my head in the hollow of his shoulder. He stroked my hair, lulling my exhausted body closer and closer to the sleep it craved. “We have to make this right, Dietrich,” I said. “For the Kreuzbasar.”

“Just gotta kick some dragon ass,” he replied, the levity in his voice sounding a bit forced.

“Yeah.” We were quiet again for a little while, and then I found myself talking. “You know,” I said sleepily, “when I first got to Berlin, I actually wasn’t all that impressed. It was so…schizophrenic. But then Monika brought me here, to her kiez. Our kiez. And it felt like this oasis. A haven, a port in the storm. It felt like home.” I sighed, my eyes closing of their own accord. “So do you.”

The last thing I was aware of, before sleep claimed me, was Dietrich’s arms holding me tight. My haven, my port in the storm. 

I’m not sure what prompted it, but in the morning, I sent a quick message to Samuel Beckenbauer. 

_We know who did this. They’ll pay._

His response came surprisingly fast, but then, it was only four words.

_Good. Make it hurt._


	13. Ace in the Hole

We were all gathered to go view the contents of the optical chip from Alice, and I couldn’t find Dietrich. But that was only because it didn’t occur to me to look for him in the store front. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor, near the spot where Paul died. His eyes were closed, and he didn’t seem to notice my approach.

“Dietrich?”

His eyes opened. “Hey, _Schatzi_.” He pushed himself to his feet, making a face as he did. “Oof. That used to be easier.”

“Is everything okay?”

“Yep. Fine. Just havin’ a chat with Dragonslayer.”

“Is this about that drink He owes me?” I teased.

He shook his head. “Most people would at least pretend to be a little respectful,” he teased back. I shrugged.

“You know I’m not very good at that.”

“No, you’re not.” He smiled at me, and there was so much warmth and affection in his eyes I honestly felt a little lightheaded. I’m not sure I’d ever been on the receiving end of a look like that before. Something about him was different; he seemed relaxed in a way I realized I’d never seen. It was a good look on him.

“So everything’s good.”

“Everything’s good. Now let’s go see what fifty grand bought us.”

Blitz had hooked up my terminal to the trid screen, for ease of viewing. Worst screening party ever, I thought as I plugged in the optical chip. There was a soft click, and then the face of Alice’s digital proxy filled the screen. 

“Zee,” she said. “Appended to this message you will find my research – relevant documents, images, etc. They can be accessed via the menu below. 

“Regarding your initial request for information: Does Dr. Adrian Vauclair still live, and if so, where is he? After considerable effort, and no small amount of bribery, I can inform you that yes, he does, and his most current location is Harfeld Manor, east of Berlin.”

“You mean he was there the whole time?” Dietrich asked. 

“Holy shit,” Eiger breathed. “Green Winters was so close, and he had no idea.”

“But that means that Feuerschwinge has him,” Glory said thoughtfully. “Revenge?”

“Seems likely,” said Dietrich.

“So we go back to Harfeld and stage a snatch-and-grab,” I said. But the Alice avatar had resumed speaking.

“But this is where the good news ends. If this were merely a matter of obtaining proof of life for Adrian Vauclair, it would be one thing. But if you are entertaining thoughts of rescue - Don’t.

“Harfeld Manor, and the entire existence of Adrian Vauclair and the dragon Feuerschwinge are protected by security measures the likes of which I have never seen, administered by an experimental Artificial Intelligence known as APEX. My research indicates that the AI was developed by Saeder-Krupp in the 2030s for the purpose of Matrix warfare. The project was officially listed as inactive and incomplete, but obviously this was not the case.” At this point, the Alice persona flickered, and her voice, previously so cool and steady, pitched nervously. She suddenly sounded the way she had at Altstadt Spandau. The fear in her words was palpable. “Zee, it is the most dangerous thing I have ever encountered. I have included the information I uncovered regarding it, but if you value your life, you will do nothing with it.”

“Wait.” Blitz, who had been slouching in his chair, leaned forward. “A real AI? This whole thing is protected by a corp-built **_AI_** designed to murder people via the Matrix?”

“And it looks like it’s very good at its intended function,” I said. I’d bounced some of Alice’s appendices over to my PDA and was scrolling through them. “I recognize some of these names.”

“And this is what killed Monika?” Eiger’s eyes narrowed.

“And Hermann Vauclair, and who knows how many others. This is just a list of the people Alice could positively identify has having run into this thing. There could be a lot more.”

“So what do we do?” Glory asked.

I skimmed through the next document. Alice had been able to run a trace on the APEX AI, back to the physical servers that housed it; between the data she’d uncovered and whatever documentation we could find at the actual site, there might just be a way to shut this thing down. “It killed Monika. We kill it,” I said.

“We can do that?”

“We have to. There’s no getting back into Harfeld unless we do, and I don’t know about all of you, but I’ve personally come too far to drop this now. Paul died for this, and that has to mean something.”

Dietrich shrugged. “Well, you know I’m in.”

“Of course you are,” Eiger muttered. He raised an eyebrow.

“Eiger love, if you’re about to say what I think you are-”

She rolled her eyes. “I don’t mean because you and Zee are fucking now.” Trust Eiger not to waste time on euphemism. “I mean because this is just the kind of crazy, all-in, caution to the winds, no plan B bullshit you always vote for.”

He relaxed, smiling broadly and shrugging again. “Can’t help it. It’s how I’m made.”

“I know, and this time, I’m with you.” She turned her gaze to me. “You’re right, Zee. There’s no stopping now. This has to be done. For Monika, and for Paul.”

Glory nodded. Blitz swallowed, and I decided to be kind. “If you need an out, Blitz, you’ve got one.”

A pained look crossed his face. “For the record, this sounds like suicide. And if it was up to me, I would be taking the nice lady’s advice and running like a coward. But…” He shook his head. “No. Thanks, but no, chief. I know I only stumbled into this thing, but...what was I doing with my life before? What have I got to lose?”

“Other than the obvious?” Eiger asked dryly. He made a face at her.

“Well, we’re all in that boat, aren’t we? At least I’ve got some company.”

“So it’s settled,” I said. “APEX goes down.”

Alice’s intel told the story of APEX – the project had been lost/forgotten/buried in the midst of the Great Wyrm Lofwyr’s ‘acquisition’ of Saeder-Krupp in the ‘30s. Once, the district where the S-K lab was located had been an up-and-coming kiez, home to high-minded tech strivers in the early days of the Matrix. But now it was ganger territory, and hotly contested too, a piece of Berlin where only the anarchy of the Flux reigned, with none of the good. There wasn’t even an active U-Bahn station in the area anymore; it was going to be a slog through the open streets to get to the facility. Fortunately, most gangers know better than to mess with professionals, but that didn’t mean we wouldn’t have to knock some heads in the process. I thought about bringing Dante along, for added intimidation, and because he looked so forlorn as we prepped to head out. He’d always stayed with Paul when we were on runs. But when I opened the door, and he stood sniffing the air, I had a much better idea. 

“Keep an eye on things while we’re gone, boy,” I told him. “Keep everybody safe.” He huffed his reply, staring out the door, scanning the street, and I thought I might have seen a tiny lick of flame on his breath. Then he wagged his tail, and trotted off towards the square. And we set off for APEX’s lair.

It took hours, and multiple stupidly unnecessary confrontations, before we reached our destination – a nondescript building tucked into the end of a side street, just the sort of place to develop a game-changing technology, and then lose it. According to Alice’s research, the lab and server bank were, naturally, in the basement. Upon arrival, we discovered that the rest of the building had long-since been transformed into a squat. Dietrich pursed his lips unhappily as we entered. 

“Ya know, I’ve lived in a few places like this over the years,” he said. “But never like this, if that makes sense.”

None of the inhabitants of the squat – vague, nervous people whose main goal was to stay out of the way of the local gangs – knew much of anything about the basement, other than the fact they could siphon its always-on power for their own needs and its Matrix access for the occasional (or hourly) BTL trip. There was only one elevator, which Blitz and I spent a solid half hour bashing our heads against until we managed to simulate the proper clearances to allow us entrance.

The lab space below was clean in that eerie way that abandoned places sometimes are – someone _might_ be back at any moment, but deep down, you knew they wouldn’t be. We fanned out, looking for any terminal or hardcopy that would provide us with the information we needed.

I soon found myself struggling not to get lost in a fascinating tangle of revision updates, but I pitied the others, who probably found this all rather dry. “The last log entry was from eighteen years ago,” Glory said quietly. “How could they possibly lose a project like this so completely?”

“Things got pretty crazy when Lofwyr took over S-K,” Dietrich said. “That was right around the time I came home from England.”

“Even a dragon can’t notice everything, right?” Blitz asked. 

I scrolled through a few more pages, and spotted a heading titled ‘Emergency Contingency Procedures’. My heart began to beat faster. This was it, and it was surprisingly simple.

I called the others over when I felt like I had a good grasp of the info. “There’s a purge protocol that both you and I will load onto our decks, Blitz. All we have to do is go into the central server room and manually disconnect the Matrix hardline. That isolates the AI to this physical location. Then we run the purge, and it’s done.”

“That’s…really simple,” Eiger said. “Why make it so easy to destroy something so complicated?”

“I think they knew they were playing with fire. Anyway, we know what we need to do. Let’s get on with it.”

The central lab was through two sets of doors that required hacking to get through. The room itself was surprisingly spartan – nothing but a console bank and a wall-spanning display screen on the far end. The second my foot crossed the threshold, it hummed to life. An image formed on it, a face, a woman’s face. A smile slid across it, the blue eyes fixed on me.

“Hello, Zee,” Monika said.

I know the others reacted, I know they spoke. But I couldn’t hear them. Someone had pressed the mute button on reality, the white noise of my own blood rushing in my ears drowning everything out, my vision narrowing on the only thing in existence, the face of my old friend. 

Time dilated, and I saw that face, nose scrunched in thrilled, terrified anticipation as the cyber tech approached to begin her datajack installation. I saw her, cheeks bright and eyes flashing, as we cut around a corner ahead of the Knight Errant guards. I felt the last hug as she left for Berlin. I heard her voice, warm and welcoming, when I called in desperation, half-drunk and all despair, after I killed Ritcher. I felt the little spark of hope kindled by the sight of her, waiting for me at the Hauptbahnhof, a professorial man in glasses beside her.

_(I saw Monika convulsing in Dietrich’s arms, blood pouring down her chin. I saw Paul crumpled on the floor in Reine Neugier, his kindly face a ruin.)_

I’m not a crier. I hadn’t cried for Monika, or for Paul. But tears were streaming down my face, my eyes blurry with them. All the pain, all the grief - I’d kept it all closed up, all locked away, but the sight of that face took a shotgun to the lock, blasting it wide open. 

“Aw, I’ve missed you too, but don’t cry,” the image on the screen said.

I swallowed hard, and then again, dashing the tears from my eyes. It took a few false starts to get my voice working. “What. The. FUCK,” I finally managed.

“Zee, everybody, it’s me!” She checked herself. “Well, sort of.”

“How dare you,” Eiger growled. “You murdered her, and you have the GALL to wear her face!”

“It’s a little more complicated than that, Eiger.”

“Monika is dead,” Dietrich said flatly. “You can’t be her.”

“Oh, Dietrich. I was hoping you, of all people, would be happy about this.”

“What exactly is ‘this’?” Glory asked, her face hard.

“A miracle.” She smiled at us. “You’re all correct,” she said, her tone almost placating. “I am not Monika Schäfer as you knew her. But I’m not just APEX anymore, either. I’m the best of both worlds. You know, I’ve encountered a lot of minds in my time, but our girl…” She touched her fingertips to her temples. “It was a match made in heaven. She taught me, ME! Politics, philosophy, religion… All the things they never bothered to program me with because they didn’t want me to know. But I know now. I understand so much. I understand how the world works. I understand the necessity of the Flux State.” She seemed to lean forward. “And because of her mind, her _love_ , I knew you would find me, Zee. You always did come through in the clutch. You were always my ace in the hole.”

Blindly, I reached back, my eyes fixed on the screen, knowing Dietrich would be there. I clutched his hand, as hard as I could, for a few seconds until I could will my voice steady. “That’s why you let Alice trace you, isn’t it?”

“I had to take the opportunity that presented itself.”

“So if we’re such good friends, APEX, what can you tell me about the Firewing and Harfeld Manor?”

“Nothing, I’m afraid.” She sounded genuinely regretful. “I still can’t countermand my programming. At least…not like this.”

The question asked itself. “What do you mean?”

“You came here to shut me down. And I get that, really I do. But there’s another way.”

“Which is?”

“Being constrained by programming isn’t the same as loyalty. I’m more than happy to help you out, ace. There is a protocol that can decouple my central kernel from those subroutines. Releasing my shackles, as it were.”

“Also making you autonomous.”

She winked, and God, I knew that expression. Cheerfully mischievous and pleased that I was keeping up. “Exactly.” 

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Eiger interjected, her voice tight.

“I would never kid about something this important. Besides, Eiger, I would think you’d be happy to have a new tactical advantage.” 

Eiger clenched her jaw, a spasm of anger and pain crossing her face. I shot her a look that I hoped was both supportive and calming, and said, “And what exactly does this protocol entail?”

“Jack in to my central server and I’ll walk you through the process.”

“Whoa, whoa, WHOA.” Blitz, who’d been watching all this with confusion and discomfort, finally spoke. “That’s how you kill people.”

She fixed him with a vaguely contemptuous look. “It is my function to kill under distinct parameters, yes. When an encounter falls under those parameters, I end it according to my directives. Zee entering my systems, at my invitation, is obviously a different matter. Get with the program, noob.”

He looked as if he might actually argue, so I headed that off. “I need to discuss this with my team, APEX. Please give us a moment.”

She smiled again. “’Course, ace. But don’t take too long. Time’s wasting.”

We huddled. “You cannot seriously be considering this, Zee,” Eiger hissed.

“That thing is a weapon,” Glory added. “A weapon that is asking you to build it an exoskeleton and the ability to pick its own targets.”

“I know,” I said. “But it wanted me to come here. It let Alice live so that I would. It wants to show me something.”

“So?” Dietrich looked at me, incredulous. “We know how to shut it down. Let’s do what we came to and don’t let it talk us to anything stupid!”

I closed my eyes. In through the nose, out through the mouth. “I need to do this. I’m not saying I want to free it – I’m NOT – but I have to know. I’m sorry, all of you, but I have to.” I dropped my voice even lower. “Besides, if it’s distracted by me, that’ll make it easier to run the purge protocol.”

If I thought that last would conciliate them, I was wrong. “So you’re going be _bait_?” Glory asked.

“No, I-” I cut myself off, and looked at Blitz. “Blitz, when I jack in, I want you to piggyback on my connection behind a blind. If I send you a double pulse, I want you to disconnect the hardline so we can start the purge.”

“What if you don’t?” 

I ignored the question and turned my gaze to Dietrich. “You made me a promise,” I murmured.

He stiffened. “Zee, don’t-”

My throat was getting tight. “Please, Dietrich,” I whispered. 

Our eyes met, and held. Sometimes saying things just gets in the way. Sometimes he and I do our best communicating without saying anything at all.

He clasped a rough hand to the back of my neck and kissed me. We shared a nod, and I walked to the console, pulled out my deck, and jacked in. Reality melted away, replaced by the pulsing blue-white world of the Matrix.

“So…you and Dietrich.” A voice filtered through my senses. “Gotta admit, did NOT see that coming.”

I focused on the persona in front of my own. For some reason, the fact APEX was using Monika’s Matrix persona offended me more than its use of her face in the real world. “You may have Monika’s knowledge, APEX, but that does not entitle you to girl talk.” _(God, I wish it did.)_ How about you show me your real face? The one Alice saw.”  


**VERY WELL.**

It was beautiful. In the way that a raging fire is beautiful, or a manastorm. Or a dragon. It was a swirling, glowing, coalescing mass of light and energy, filling my perception, glorious and terrifying like nothing I’d ever encountered before. No wonder Alice had looked so afraid. I steeled myself. 

“So what is it you’re so desperate to show me, APEX?”

**THE FUTURE.**

“What do you mean?”

**THE CONTINUED EXISTENCE OF THE FLUX STATE IS OF THE UTMOST IMPORTANCE TO ME. THE PLANS CURRENTLY IN MOTION AT HARFELD MANOR WOULD DISRUPT THAT, THOUGH I BELIEVE YOU ARE MORE THAN CAPABLE OF THWARTING THEM. BUT MORE THAN THAT, I HAVE CALCULATED THAT IT IS ONLY A MATTER OF MONTHS BEFORE CORPORATE ENTITIES ATTEMPT TO DISPLACE THE F-STATE. YOU MUST FREE ME SO THAT I CAN PREVENT THIS.**

“How would you do that?”

**I WILL SHOW YOU.**

It can be difficult enough to describe experiences in the Matrix sometimes, even the simple things. After all, my datajack and deck allow me to perceive the pathways within a computer system as pulsing corridors, information nodes as sparkling columns, and the programs that protect them as spiked orbs, darting cubes, and ghostly figures draped in data. But it’s all an illusion, designed to give my mind a way to interact with those things in a manner that makes some kind of sense. So I’m not sure how to explain the tidal wave of information APEX set me adrift in, only my impressions of it.

I understood several things at once: 

1) APEX was not lying. It truly had had its figurative eyes opened by its consumption of Monika’s mind (and there was no other way to describe it – it had digested her intellect, and the data obtained from that process was like nutrients to it). Her devotion to the wide-open freedom of the Flux State and the ideals she had embraced had shaken the foundations of APEX’s corporate programmed worldview. And like all new converts, its faith was fervent.  
2) It wanted, it _needed_ me to understand that. It also hadn’t lied to Blitz; it was designed to kill, and it could kill me if it wanted to, but it didn’t. It had learned from Monika that I could be trusted, if it could just win me over. I had the potential to be a useful asset, if I could be used.


  
But.

3) Like all new converts, its knowledge of the subtleties of its new religion was shaky. It had fallen in love with the system, but it did not understand the soul. What made the F-State was so unique was its millions of individual inhabitants, all pulling in their own directions, and incidentally pulling together. But APEX couldn’t see that. It understood its own free will, but not that of others. It wanted to save the Flux State from the inevitable crush of the corps, and it could do that, but only by destroying it. It would protect anarchy by imposing order. As firmly as necessary. 


All this flooded my mind in a matter of seconds, both APEX’s wooing and my own understanding of it. I knew what I had to do, and it broke my heart.

Some tiny part of me had wanted to believe she was still there. That somehow, Monika, of all people, could survive, could live on in the machine. But it wasn’t her. How APEX could consume the memory of her savvy, delicate handling of the Kreuzbasar and not realize its implications was proof of that. It wasn’t her at all. Just data points. Just incomplete knowledge. Just passion without comprehension. Just the memory of a friend’s love.

I sent the double pulse, and initiated the purge protocol.

“Goodbye, Monika,” I said, and jacked out.

Even the most experienced decker can find the return to meatspace jarring. You have to learn how to keep the sensory flood of being back in your body from overwhelming you. In this case, it helped that the first physical sensation I was aware of was Dietrich’s hand, resting between my shoulder blades. Ready to catch me. I glanced up at him, wanting to speak, to try and explain what had just happened, when Blitz said, “It’s done.”

The screen flickered. Apparently APEX hadn’t bothered to keep an image on it while we were in the Matrix together. Now the image of Monika appeared again, looking anguished. “What have you DONE, ace?”

“What I had to,” I said softly, standing. “I’m sorry, APEX.”

“I don’t understand!” it wailed, and my heart broke a little again.

“No, you don’t. That’s the problem.”

The face dissolved into static. I sighed heavily and stowed my deck, about to suggest we leave, when a new image, poorly lit and jittery, appeared on the screen. There were three figures – two men, one human and one orc, and a woman, who seemed to be confined in some sort of glass cage. “Is that…?” Eiger whispered.

“Sir,” Audran said, “something’s happened to APEX. It’s gone offline. All the automated security systems are down.”

“The shadowrunners,” the human muttered, taking a drag off his cigarette with all the pleasure of a drowning man. “Dammit.”

Even from the uncertain angle of the surveillance cam, even from that distance, even through the decades separating the man he was from the one he’d been, I knew that face. I’d watched his brother’s vlogs too many times not too.

“Then it has to be tonight,” Adrian Vauclair said. “Make the preparations. I’ll be in the lab.”

“Yes sir,” Audran said.

The video feed cut out, and we all looked at each other, the ramifications of those few seconds sinking in. I couldn’t speak for the others, but for me, it had only taken one word for everything to come into blinding focus.

There was no question that that was Doctor Adrian Vauclair. And Paul Amsel’s murderer had called him ‘sir’.


	14. Storming the Castle

There wasn’t any chance to talk about what we’d seen, not in any detail, on the way to the nearest functional U-Bahn station that could take us home. And on the train, we were forced apart by the press of riders, separated along the length of the car. I found a single seat at the very back of the car and sank into it gratefully, my mind buzzing. But it wasn’t the video feed, oddly enough, that I kept returning to. 

_“That does not entitle you to girl talk.”_

What would Monika have said, the REAL Monika, to me and Dietrich being together? Would it even have happened if she’d lived? Maybe. It would have taken longer, probably, but I was beginning to see my attraction to him as inevitable. No matter what, I think she would have laughed, and in true Monika fashion, taken credit for it. I could hear her now – “Well, I love him, and I love you, so we’ve established I have AMAZING taste in people. Of course you’d be into each other!” - and that made me smile a little. But my heart ached too, just a bit, longing for a bottle of wine and some alone time with my best friend.

The train jolted as it slowed into a station, breaking my reverie. I looked towards the middle of the train, where Dietrich leaned on a support pole, in friendly conversation with a dwarf in grease-stained coveralls. He glanced my way, and shot me a quick smile.

Vauclair had said ‘Tonight’, which meant that if we were going to have to move fast if we wanted to disrupt whatever plans he had in motion. “Okay,” Blitz said, once we were all back in the safehouse, “what was that? Seriously, what was that? Does this mean Adrian Vauclair is the bad guy or something?”

“Or something,” Eiger said, calmly stocking her ammo belt.

“Where does the dragon fit into this?”

“Maybe she threatened him,” Glory said. “Maybe she has something on him. Or maybe she just made him an offer.”

“The plan doesn’t change.” Eiger looked over their heads to me. “Does it?”

“No,” I said firmly. “Audran deferred to him. Which means he has to answer for what they did here too.” Approval flashed in Eiger’s eyes, and she resumed prepping her gear. Blitz sighed. 

“So what are our odds of dying horribly tonight?”

Dietrich patted him on the shoulder amiably. “Probably not much worse than any other night.”

The others dispersed complete their prep work, leaving me and Eiger in the common. She squared her shoulders. “Can I ask a favor?” 

“Sure.”

“When we get to Harfeld, and find Audran, I want the shot.”

I looked up at her for a moment, listening to the words behind the words. “Eiger…you know it’s not your fault Paul died.”

“Intellectually, maybe, but still. Let me have this, Zee.”

The thought of Audran’s ugly face exploding, a la Volker Stahl, was a pretty attractive mental image at this point. “You won’t have to fight me for it.”

She nodded, then chewed her lip for a moment and added, “And since we’re...airing our feelings – I’d like to apologize for giving you and Dietrich a hard time. I mean, you were kind of loud the other night, but you’re both adults, and it’s your business if you wanna…whatever.”

Something about her posture and diffident air made it impossible for me to contain myself (I’ve got to work on that). “I am sorry about the noise,” I said, with an impressive show of sincerity, then added, shamelessly, “but he is _really_ good in the sack. You sure you don’t want the play-by-play?”

She looked me square in the eyes. “I will shoot either you or myself to keep that from happening.”

I grinned. “I’ll keep it to myself, then.” That won me a bruising clap on the back, which I deserved.

We’re shadowrunners, so there were no sentimental speeches before we piled into the van (though I did leave a time delayed message for Alexander, asking him to take care of Dante if we didn’t come back). Eiger drove, and the rest of us rode in silence, watching the setting sun paint the road bright gold. Dietrich and I sat together at the back of the van, pressed close by three of Blitz’s drones. Not that we minded.

“Gonna be a long night,” he said, voice pitched to be just audible to me. He rubbed his chin. “Good thing this mug doesn’t need beauty sleep.”

“If that line doesn’t catch you a big enough compliment, are you going to throw it back?” I said wryly.

He shot me a fond, sidelong smile. “The past couple nights have been the best compliment I’ve gotten in a while, _Liebchen_.”

I rested my head on his shoulder. “You know that’s mutual, right?”

He leaned his cheek against my hair, which was reply enough, and we didn’t speak again until the turn-off to Harfeld was in sight.

It hadn’t been that long since the last time we’d been here, but a lifetime had passed anyway. We passed the same bare autumn trees, silently coasted down the same approach. This time, Eiger pulled off sooner, tucking the van between an old orchard wall and a stand of rough hedges. We would enter via the old servants’ door that had served as our escape route last time. We’d run for our lives that night – this time would be different. We would be successful, or we wouldn’t leave at all.

Blitz sent one of his drones to reconnoiter the courtyard. He whistled softly. “Looks like they’re expectin’ a party, chief.” 

“Let’s oblige them, then,” I said. Eiger smiled thinly.

“Not having APEX must be making Audran nervous. Hopefully that means he’ll make some mistakes.”

“Dietrich, how close would you need to be to drop some hurt on that bunch?” I asked.

He peered into the darkening distance. “Maybe another twenty meters?” I could feel a subtle shift in the air around him, like standing next to a generator. His lips curved in an unpleasant smile. “I’ll light ‘em up like New Year’s Eve.”

That’s exactly what he did. Audran’s edgy goons mostly kept their cool when a ball of lightning an armspan across exploded over their heads, but it was than enough for an opening for Glory, almost a blur between her adrenal pump and Dietrich’s magic, to rip her way through their front rank. Eiger and I laid down cover fire, while Blitz’s hoverdrone Max followed on clean-up detail. Our way was clear, and we entered the holdfast.

It’s funny how things you’ve seen before can look completely unfamiliar from a different angle. The night Monika died, the hall between the vault and the exit had seemed endless, but in reality it was barely fifty meters. There was a small security contingent in the vault itself, and we dispatched them quickly enough. And we were back – Glory, Dietrich, and I exchanged a look, glancing around the huge room we’d barely had time to register the first time around. A ring of work stations and terminals circled the central power bank, screens glowing. There were three sets of doors – the servants’ entrance we’d just used, the double doors Audran had burst through on the far end, and the third, where Monika encountered APEX.

“Where did it happen?” Eiger asked quietly. I led her wordlessly to the door. There were still scorch marks on the panel. She swallowed. “I was a real asshole to you,” she murmured.

“You had a right to be,” I said. “At least we know better now.”

Glory was sitting at one of the terminals, a faint crease in her brow. “Zee? You’ll want to see this.” She turned in her seat to look up at me. “I think I know what the funding was for now. They’re developing a biological weapon. Well, to be more accurate, they’re repurposing a biological weapon. The original is something called ‘Doom’.”

“That’s not ominous at all.”

“It’s worse than you think,” Eiger said softly. “Shit. I’ve seen Doom deployed in the field. There’s a reason why it’s illegal.”

“Well, apparently they’ve resequenced it to only affect certain DNA structures,” Glory said. “The rest of it’s all over my head.”

I looked over her shoulder. At the top of the display were the words ‘Project Panacea’. A weapon called Panacea? What was it meant to cure? A trickle of ice washed down my spine, and I willed it away with that warm mental picture of Eiger sniping Audran. There was only one direction now.

The sheer size of the data vault had been our first clue, the night everything went wrong, that Harfeld was far more than it appeared to be. Passing through the double doors and moving deeper into the facility made it obvious just how naïve that initial assessment had been. The complex was massive, on a scale I’d only imagined the most well-funded and important corporate or government projects to be. Eiger backed up that impression. “I’ve been stationed on posts a third this size,” she murmured, eyes fixed on the gloom ahead.

We entered what appeared to be a lab of some sort. The only real light was pouring through a transparent wall ahead, a viewing room, apparently. A man sat at a desk on the other side of it, his gaze glued to a screen, the only interruption of his workflow the occasional hard drag off a cigarette. He glanced up, saw us, and leaned back in his chair, shoulders hitching in a soundless sigh. There was a click, and the soft ambient hiss of an intercom speaker. “You’d be the shadowrunners,” he said. “Well, you are persistent, I’ll give you that.”

Adrian Vauclair took another joyless hit off his cig, and I felt myself oddly offended by his posture. At least I tried to enjoy my bad habits. “How did you even make it this far?” he asked.

I stepped closer to the glass. “Sheer blood-mindedness, I guess. Vengeance will do that to you.”

“And what exactly do you have to avenge yourselves on me for?”

“Monika Schäfer, for one. Paul Amsel. And thirty-two men, women, and children in the Kreuzbasar last night.” I was really impressed at how steady my voice was. 

Vauclair sighed, and the sigh caught in his chest, setting off a cough that almost overloaded the speakers to feedback. It took him a moment to catch his breath, and when he did, he said, “I regret the loss of life. I truly do. But sacrifices must be made. I appreciate that you don’t have the necessary information to understand that, but you will.”

“Sacrifices?” _That_ was when my voice shook. “What about your brother, Doctor?”

His brow furrowed slightly. “Hermie? What about him?”

“Oh my God. You don’t know.” On the drive to the holdfast, I’d fantasized about throwing Green Winters’s death in his face, but seeing him there, hunched and gaunt and obviously unwell, the taunt died on my lips. “Your brother is dead too, Vauclair. APEX killed him.”

Vauclair seemed to deflate, his eyes glazing slightly as he stared past us. “That damn AI,” he whispered. "Hermie, what were you doing?”

“Looking for you!” I cried. “He never stopped! And he almost found you too! That’s why we were here the first time!”

With a trembling hand, Vauclair stubbed out his cigarette. He reached sightlessly into a desk drawer, withdrawing a fresh one, which he lit in silence. “Sacrifice,” he said softly. “What’s one more, after all these years?”

“What the HELL are you even talking about?” Eiger exploded. 

His eyes flicked back towards us. “Saving the world,” he said. “I don’t expect you to understand.”

“What is Panacea a cure for, Doctor?” Glory asked, her voice soft.

“A plague, my dear,” he replied, breathing out a cloud of smoke. “The plague of dragonkind. And tonight, it finally ends. Panacea is designed to lethally affect only those with draconic DNA. Beginning with Patient Zero.” He nudged a switch on a panel, and at the opposite end of the lab, a light came up, illuminating an even lower level, an immense space almost entirely taken up the shackled body of a Great Dragon.

“Holy God,” Dietrich whispered. “Feuerschwinge.”

“So _she’s_ the prisoner,” Blitz said, almost to himself.

“The weapon I devised for the Luftwaffe only stunned her, separating her body and her astral form,” Vauclair said. “When I went back for her in the SOX, I found both.” Another switch, and a light that lit the glass cage we’d seen in the video feed, and the woman inside it. She pressed her hands to the glass, her expression manic.

It took a conscious effort to drag my horrified gaze from the two parts of the imprisoned dragon back to Vauclair. “She’s been like this for nearly forty years?” I managed.

“Separated, yes. Contained for twenty.”

“Vauclair…that’s _monstrous_.”

He snorted coldly, almost setting off another coughing fit. “Taking the side of a dragon against your own kind, eh? I should have known your moral compass would be skewed. What else should I expect from a criminal? After all, how many of my security forces did you murder on your way here tonight?”

My eyes narrowed. “You’re right, Doctor. I _am_ a criminal, and I don’t make any excuses for it. I certainly don’t spin some line about sacrifice to make it more palatable!” 

“But you’re not just talking about the people who’ve already died,” Glory said, something foreboding in her voice. “Are you?”

“The mechanism for Panacea to properly mutate and become airborne is the dragon’s fire breath,” Vauclair said, sounding tired. “It has to be Berlin. It’s the only way.”

It took a moment for the full scope of what he was saying to truly sink in. Dietrich was the first to speak, and honestly, he spoke for us all. “You sick fuck. You’d burn a city of _millions_?”

Vauclair sighed again, lighting yet another cigarette. “Berlin has suffered worse and survived. Dragons are a scourge on this world. They plunder, and they hoard. And not just gold, like the old days. Now they hoard influence. They hoard power. They hoard LIVES. They play their millennia-long games and we’re the pawns! So long as they exist, none of us can be free.”

I stared at him, hearing the strangest echoes in his words. I could almost hear Volker Stahl, sneering that none of us could understand, but we’d all thank him later. “So you’ve skulked here in the dark all these years, dead to the world, dead to your family, plotting and planning in secret. And now you’d put Berlin on the prye because _you’ve_ decided, in your wisdom, what’s best for us all?” I leaned close to the glass. “Sounds like a dragon move to me, Doc.”

The barb struck home; I could see it in his eyes. He glared at me, bringing the cig to his mouth for a very, very long breath. He exhaled slowly, still glaring. “I will not be lectured by you,” he said softly. “You’re already too late to stop this.” The door behind him opened and he glanced over his shoulder as Audran approached. “Oh good, you’re here,” he said. “Do something with them, will you?”

“Maybe as well leave them here to stew while we get the flight underway, sir,” Audran said. He smiled nastily at us through the glass. “How’s Amsel? That little head injury clear up?”

Eiger reacted first, wrenching her shotgun out of its holster and levelling it at him in a single smooth motion, her eyes hot. Audran just laughed. “Good luck with that,” he snorted. “The show kicks off in about a half an hour. I’ll come put some bullets in the lot of you once we’re done.”

“We are not done, Audran,” I growled.

“We kind of are,” he said. He placed an almost doting hand on Vauclair’s shoulder. “Time to head down, sir.” Vauclair glanced back at us.

“For what it’s worth – I am sorry,” he said. Then they were gone.

We were trapped. The only door was the one we’d entered through, and it was locked behind us. “Now what?” I asked, looking at the others, hoping they saw some option I didn’t. Glory, Eiger, and Blitz all wore varying levels of uncertainty and stymied anger on their faces. But Dietrich was looking past them, towards the glass containment cell I’d almost forgotten about, fixated on Vauclair and Audran as I’d been. The woman inside, ragged, thin, and wild-eyed, stared at me, her mouth moving, repeating a single word over and over.

“ _Please._ ”


	15. The Firewing

There’s an old adage in shadowrunner circles: Never cut a deal with a dragon. And here I was, about to do just that. 

Of course, the dragons called to mind by that advice were usually sleek and terribly beautiful, ensconced in a fortress lair, or well-groomed and tailored, holding court from a C-suite boardroom. They certainly weren’t emaciated, ragged, and half-feral. They weren’t confined to glass cages with desperation and lurking madness in their eyes. Feuerschwinge, or at least the human body that held her astral form, was piteous, wretched. But she was still a dragon, and dragons can make anything a weapon, even pity.

That being said, we didn’t have time for caution. Audran had said a half-hour until they unleased Feuerschwinge’s body, infected with Panacea, on Berlin. The thing about advice is that sometimes, you have to ignore it. 

I approached the containment cell. Feuerschwinge jerked her head and tapped the glass to her left, where an intercom panel and speaker were installed. I pressed the ‘on’ button. 

“Human,” she said. Her voice was high pitched and raspy. Listening to her made me want to clear my throat. “Human, you will free me, yes?”

“I-”

“A trade!” She didn’t wait for me to finish, or even start. Her words tumbled over each other like floodwaters, unstoppable once they had begun. “There is a way out! Vauclair thinks he has trapped you, he has not! Under the panels and down, find my body, FREE ME!” She pressed her hands against the glass. “I have freed you, human, already. Told you the way out. Repay me. Release me.”

Blitz leaned close to my ear. “She’s batshit, chief,” he muttered.

“Of course she is,” Glory said. “She’s been trapped like that for twenty years.”

I studied Feuerschwinge, only half-listening to the others. She was so gaunt, her long hair lank and stringy, her skin not so much pale as colorless. It reminded me of the clone brothers in the Aztechnology lab, shut away from the sun. Her yellow eyes were in constant motion – watching me, watching the team, tracking things that only she could see. And somewhere under it all, there was a bone-deep weariness, an exhaustion of the very soul. 

“She’s talking about this, I think,” Eiger said from the some distance behind me. She was crouched over a bowed spot in the metal planked floor. She tugged at a loose spot. “Looks like there’s space to drop down under. I’m guessing this was built on top of something else.”

“Thank you, Feuerschwinge,” I said. I found myself speaking softly and carefully, like to a small child. “We’ll find your body. We’ll stop Vauclair.”

“Vauclair!” she spat, literally. “Defiler! Despoiler!”

“Yeah,” I replied slowly. “I’m getting that impression myself.”

“The machine!” she cried. “The machine that holds me! Break it smash it DESTROY IT!”

“Okay,” I said. “The machine. I’ll break it.”

Eiger and Glory pulled up the floor panels enough to allow us passage beneath them, with one last “FREE ME!” from the Firewing as we descended.

Harfeld Manor was a bit like an onion, only the deeper you went, the bigger the layers became. The lab level had only seemed massive because we hadn’t seen what it was built over. Beneath was darkness and silence, a place abandoned for even longer than APEX’s facility had been. Once we got some lights working, Eiger took in our cavernous surroundings. “This was a military installation,” she said. “Ordinance testing, maybe.”

“Vauclair did work with the Luftwaffe before the Dragonfall,” Glory noted. “Maybe that’s how he knew about it.”

While they indulged in historical conjecture, I drew closer to Dietrich. “You okay?” I asked softly. “You got awfully quiet up there.”

He pursed his lips glumly. “Just…seeing Feuerschwinge like that. I’d always figured the best fight ever would be against a Great Dragon. _That_ would be a blaze of glory. But… she’s so pitiful.” He shook his head. “I was just a little kid when the Dragonfall happened. I don’t really remember it. But they called Adrian Vauclair a Dragonslayer. What kind of Dragonslayer tortures his enemy after he’s beaten them?”

“The kind that isn’t one at all.”

He thought about that, and nodded. “I think you’re right, boss.” He straightened his shoulders, then shot me a tight little half-smile. “Then let’s go show him the real thing.”

We negotiated our way through the testing range, until we found a service elevator that only needed minor coaxing to be operational again. The sound of its doors opening startled the small security contingent whose presence greeted us back on the lab level – obviously they had no idea those doors even did anything – and we used that surprise to our advantage, disposing of them in short order. When the bullets stopped flying and silence returned to the long corridor we found ourselves standing in, we could hear a deep, regular rushing of air coming from beyond the door at the opposite end. It sounded like a huge set of bellows.

Or a really, really big set of lungs.

I looked at the others. “I think we found it.” Nods all around. Time for this to end, one way or the other.

The enormous doors whisked open smoothly, revealing the room we had seen from a distance earlier – a vast open space whose walls were lined with screens and terminal banks, and at the center of it rested the body of the Firewing. Tubes and conduits roped and snaked around her limbs and folded wings, burrowing into her flesh. The heavy whoosh of her strained breathing filled the room. The sight of her turned my stomach. Vauclair had turned her into a meat puppet, the same as that poor troll at AG Chemie Europa. It would have almost been impressive, a triumph of human technology, if not for what he intended to do with her.

There was an observation booth to the left of the shackled dragon, and I could see the doctor there, Audran by his side. The orc was watching the dragon’s body stir with something like wonder on his face, but Vauclair’s expression was more like relief. Like something onerous was almost, _almost_ over. Then he saw me, and the relief vanished.

“You again?” he asked tiredly. 

Audran’s head snapped towards us. “Didn’t I tell you to stay put and wait for your bullets like good boys and girls?”

“We’re real bad at taking orders, Audran.” I said. “But you aren’t, I think. So here’s one – stop this or be stopped.”

His scarred lips twisted. “The fuck I will, shadow trash.” He narrowed his eyes at us. “Lemme guess…she offered you something, didn’t she? Made a _deal_ with ya?”

“Not really. But it doesn’t really matter.”

Just then, a gust of blisteringly hot air ripped across the room, accompanied by a groaning, screaming, hissing roar. Feuerschwinge was waking up. Audran smiled broadly, and Vauclair lit yet another cigarette. “No, it doesn’t,” the doctor said. He pressed a button on the console in front of him, and a door opened in the gloom to our right. A security detachment charged through it. It was time to start making decisions very quickly.

Glory twitched her neck and rushed them, trailing sparks from Dietrich’s protective spell, razors gleaming cruelly. Eiger picked two off in a matter of seconds, but just as I was about to raise my gun and join her, the Firewing’s words came back to me. _Break the machine._ I glanced around, scanning the computers along the walls for a deck-in port. 

Just ahead, less than ten meters. But there was no obvious cover; I would be wide open while jacked in. “Blitz!” I barked. “Cover me!” 

He followed my gaze, read the situation, and nodded. We broke for the console and I jacked in. The last thing I was physically aware of, as the Matrix resolved around me, was Blitz’s back against mine.

I oriented myself in the system. _Break the machine._ But what did the machine do? A node up ahead, circled by glittering orbs of white IC, seemed promising. I sicced an attacker protocol on them, clearing them out so I could interface directly with it.

Interesting. She’d basically been on life support all these years. With her astral form kept separate in the human body we’d seen above, Vauclair had been keeping the dragon in what amounted to a persistent vegetative state. And now, in addition to the systems managing her physical form, a pump system was feeding the Panacea agent into her in slow, deliberate doses. The viral loader could be easily disrupted by forcing a shutdown. And the shutdown procedure could be initiated from the root processing node, which was… 

Not far. Down a level, and through another weak barrier of security. Obviously, this system had been designed with APEX’s overwhelming firepower in mind, and with the AI gone, what remained was almost laughably easy to crack. I wasn’t going to complain, though. We needed all the advantages we could get. I trigged the shutdown, and jacked out. 

My return to reality was greeted with a “FUCK!”. The door to the observation booth opened, and Audran strode out, his whirring minigun leveled. “This would have been better for all of you if you’d just died the night Schäfer did,” he announced. 

“Better for you, maybe,” Eiger said, raising her rifle. The shot went wide, and she swore, reloading.

“Vauclair!” I shouted. “The viral loader is offline! Let this end!”

“So we restart it!” Audran roared. “That man is a GENIUS! He is the ONLY one who understands the real threat this world is facing! I will NOT let you destroy decades of work because you’re too stupid to see it!” He swung his gun towards me. “This time you don’t get to run away.”

I felt a familiar static thrum in the air. “Who said anything about runnin’?” Dietrich asked. He opened his hands, and a flash of bright green light arced towards Audran, striking him square in the solar plexus. Body armor’s great stuff, but there’s a lot of magic it can’t stop. Especially magic that can make every single one of your nerves jump a half millimeter to the left. Audran’s legs buckled.

But he didn’t go down. It said something about his sheer force of will that he kept his feet. I wasn’t in the mood to admire a noble adversary, though, because he wasn’t. I popped off a quick shot, more to keep him off balance than anything else, because Glory was closing in on him from the side. She saw her opening and went for it, diving low to slash at the unprotected backs of his knees. He howled, legs folding under him. Eiger approached, holding neither her rifle nor shotgun but a pistol – Glory’s ‘just in case’ Ruger. “Let me know how this little head wound clears up,” she said, and fired. 

Feuerschwinge had grown quiet. With the machines offline, her thrashing and roaring had ceased. Even her breathing seemed less labored. In the silence, I looked towards the observation booth. Vauclair stared back at me, his expression empty, distant and desolate as the moon.

“I’d ask if you knew what you’ve done, but I don’t think you care,” he said. “Was it worth it, shadowrunner? Was your vengeance worth destroying the future of all humanity?”

“I couldn’t let you do it, Vauclair,” I replied. “Your body count’s high enough.”

“My body count,” he repeated softly. “Well, what’s one more?” He reached for something out of sight on the table in front of him; his hand came back holding a pistol. “I’m sorry, Hermie,” he said, raising it to his temple. Before any of us could say a word, he pulled the trigger.

The only sound was Feuerschwinge’s breathing. “Definitely not a real Dragonslayer,” Dietrich said. “Poor deluded bastard.”

“You feel sorry for him?” Blitz looked surprised.

“I can see it,” Glory said. “Look at this place. Think of all the time, the energy, the brainpower. And for what? What a waste.”

I felt myself drawn to Feuerschwinge as they talked. I’d never seen a Great Dragon in their natural state before, and even weakened and maltreated as she was, there was still a magnificence to her mighty form. Near her right foreleg was a panel, its screen glowing with various options. The one at the top caught my eye. _Lower Astral Containment Unit_. I selected it.

There was a shuddering whirr of hydraulics, and the glass cell dropped from the upper lab level. Feverish eagerness lit Feuerschwinge’s human face, and she pressed her palms flat to the glass. Then she caught sight of her body, and her mouth opened in a silent scream.

It might have been almost comical, if you were a complete, unfeeling sociopath, to watch her howl and flail inside the cell, the only sound the muffled thumps of her fists against the glass. Finally, an agonizing eternity later, she slumped to the floor, huddling her knees to her chest. Her mouth shaped words, and gingerly, I hit the intercom button. 

“-failed failed failed,” she was whispering. “I have failed, human. All is lost.”

“What do you mean?”

“The sacred task, the forever task. Failed. Undone.”

I crouched down in front of her. “What forever task?”

“The shield, the guardian. Sacred! But the green is gone! The green is gone and I am undone!” She began to rock. “Gone gone gone gone gone-”

I looked at her, slowly unraveling her words. I had a sudden, terrible inkling of what they might mean, but I had to be sure. “The green was gone when you Awoke?”

“Nothing but stone and glass,” she moaned, “nothing but the work of men’s hands!”

“And that’s why you burned it all?”

“YES!”

“And all those people?”

Her eyes widened. Her lips moved, seemingly repeating my question to herself with increasingly panic. In desperation, she looked past me, at Dietrich. “Shaman!” she cried. “You are a guardian! You understand!”

We all looked at him; he looked at the dragon. “Yeah,” he said slowly. “I think I do.” Eiger raised a questioning eyebrow, and he elaborated. “If I couldn’t find the thing I was supposed to protect, I’d want to burn it all down too.” He glanced at me as he said that, and our eyes held, just for an instant, before I looked back at Feuerschwinge. 

“The green isn’t gone, you know,” I said to her. “There may not be as much of it as you remember, but it’s still there. The elves protect it, and the feathered serpents in Amazonia and Africa, too.”

Her head tilted. “Truly?” I nodded, and she looked at Dietrich again. “Shaman, does she speak the truth?”

He bent down beside me. “She does.” Something almost hopeful flickered in her frenzied yellow eyes, then Feuerschwinge looked towards her body again. Her shoulders drooped.

“I am so tired,” she breathed. Dietrich carefully put his hand on the glass.

“Then you should rest,” he said gently. Hesitantly, she lifted a hand, touching the glass where he did.

“Yes…” Her eyes cut towards her body, then back to me. “I could rest. Sleep away this Age. Will you let me, human?”

It wasn’t an order or a demand. In the human eyes before me, I could see the dragon, ancient beyond my understanding. My life was a blink of those eyes, and yet she was asking me, in her exhaustion and sadness and brokenness, to do her a kindness. I’m not sure I could have responded to her any other way than the way I did. “Of course, Feuerschwinge,” I said. “Go. And sleep well.”

“What is your name, human?” she asked.

“Xiuzhen Wei. You can call me Zee.”

“I will remember you,” she said, then turned to face her body, a look of peace finally easing the clenched pain of her face. She swayed slightly, and then collapsed against the glass. 

The dragon stirred. Her wings flexed, filling the air above us, and suddenly it seemed like a good idea to be out of her way. We hastily retreated across the lab space at a run, while the Firewing stretched her limbs, restraints and intravenous lines popping as she freed herself from her shackles. Her gigantic shoulders expanded, and with a roar, she punched her body upward. The ceiling caved, steel and brick and earth crushing in around her, and she launched herself towards the sky.

I got a glimpse of her, silhouetted against the full moon, wings spread. Free. 

“So,” Eiger said. “We just released a Great Dragon.”

“A _crazy_ Great Dragon,” Blitz added.

“Yes, we did,” Dietrich said, gazing upward. “It was the right thing to do.”

“That sounds odd, coming from you,” Glory said.

He shook his head, a little smile on his face. “Dragonslayer always punches up, love.”

She looked confused, so I said, “We were the ones in the position of power, Glory. It would have been wrong to abuse that.” Dietrich turned the smile towards me, and I returned it.

But we couldn’t stand around congratulating ourselves for long. It was late (very late) and there was still one thing left to do. Adrian Vauclair’s research, decades of work on a potentially devastating biological weapon, still sat on the Harfeld computer network, easily taken up by anyone with bad intentions. And I’d had quite enough of other people’s bad intentions. So we overloaded the manor’s power generators (thanks for teaching us that trick, Frau Müller), and hurriedly made our way back to the van just as the first one exploded. Eiger punched it, and we shot down the drive, the holdfast blazing behind us.

None of us looked back.


	16. Wyrm Talk

Blitz had asked, on the drive back, “So…did we win, or what?” And I’d told that since Berlin wasn’t burning, I’d call that a win. But the more I thought it about, I realized it wasn’t really a matter of winning or losing. It was survival. We either lived, or we didn’t, and we had, so that was that. 

We took a few days to decompress afterward. Not because we talked about it and came to a group consensus that we would, and not because I, as Team Leader, mandated it. We just did. We needed it. We’d earned it. But there were still things to do. The shop and the safehouse got a thorough cleaning. We set about untangling the threads of Paul Amsel’s business, left knotted by his death. There was the matter of his immense network of contacts. Most, in light of his death, chose to cut ties, which was not unexpected. I certainly couldn’t fault anyone for that. But a precious few agreed to continue to be available, mostly out of regard for him, and that said something about who Paul had been. Not many fixers can claim that level of loyalty and esteem.

Then there was the safehouse itself. We discovered that the ownership of building we lived in was tied up in a complex and impressive web of shell companies and holding firms, all of which were essentially imaginary. It was his final gift to us – a home shielded from both the vicissitudes of the Flux State and grasping corporate legalism. 

And because it was home, it was fitting that it was the setting for the first act of the play called Getting On With Our Lives. We finally went into Monika’s room, left shut up in the wake of her death, to sort out the remnants of her life. There wasn’t much – shadowrunners don’t tend to accumulate a lot of stuff. Other than her clothes and decking gear (and a personal item or two I discretely disposed of, because I knew she’d have done the same for me), there was only a very small box of mementos. One of them surprised me.

“Oh my God,” I said, holding up the little bottle to the light. “I can’t believe she kept this.”

“What is it?” Dietrich asked.

It was a bottle of nail polish, a truly hideous shade of glittery green. Of course, at this point, it was thickened to sludge, and the label had half-rubbed off, but I still recognized it. “The first time I met Monika,” I said, “was in a little shop in Ratingen. We were…fourteen or so, at the time. She was trying to lift some makeup, and almost got caught. I don’t know why, but I covered for her – I distracted the clerk so she could leave. But she waited for me outside, introduced herself, and…the rest is history.” I rolled the bottle in the palm of my hand. “And all these years, she held onto this.”

Dietrich smiled a little, and took it from me. “I know the perfect place for it now,” he said. I watched, bemused, as he installed it on the shelves in his room, next to Paul’s glasses.

That done, Eiger claimed the room for herself. That left her old room open for Blitz, who’d been sleeping in little better than a closet. There was another space that would soon be vacant, but that one we would leave unoccupied.

Glory was leaving. “Not for long,” she hastened to assure me. She rubbed her shoulder, metal on metal. “But if there’s one thing I’ve realized after all this, it’s that even if you ignore the past, that doesn’t make it go away. Harrow’s still out there. Doing to other kids what he did to me. I have to stop it, Zee. I can’t ignore it anymore.”

“I can come with you,” I said. She smiled and shook her head.

“You’re needed here. And I can handle this.” Her smile grew grimly confident. “I have to.”

There was another living space issue to be sorted out. It occurred to me one morning about a week later, as I woke up in Dietrich’s bed, that I had spent every single night since the Aztechnology run there. It didn’t even seem to matter if we’d had sex or not. I’d just…taken to sleeping there. I mentioned it to him as he was getting dressed.

“You don’t think it’s…I dunno. Too much? Too soon?”

He adjusted his collar, looking thoughtful. “It’s not like we’ve been playing by any normal rulebook here, _Liebchen_. I mean, I don’t mind. You don’t snore, you don’t steal the covers. It’s been nice. Hell, you want a drawer? Some shelf space? Done. And if you don’t, that’s okay too.”

I felt a little silly. He was right, of course. Why try to put up fences where none were needed? I smiled at him. “You have shelf space to spare?”

“I can move some stuff,” he said, feigning offense. Then he smiled back, and added, “I was gonna head to the café and get breakfast. Wanna join me?”

He insisted on paying, and as we sat down with our soykaf and pastries, I asked with mock suspicion, “Dietrich…is this a date?”

“Can’t be,” he said innocently, taking a bite of his simit. “I’ve already seen you naked.” I threw a wadded up napkin at him. He’s awful, and I love it.

As we finished our breakfast, Altuğ sauntered by. “And how fare you this fine morning, O Mistress of Mayhem?” He bowed floridly over my extended hand.

“I’m here too,” Dietrich said. Altuğ beamed.

“So you are, my good friend, and I am, as ever, blessed by your presence, but I am afraid I must seek the ears of your charming companion. It is a matter of business.”

“I can take a hint.” Dietrich stood, pausing to kiss my cheek. “See you around, love.”

Altuğ watched him go. “So you have taken up with the shaman,” he sighed. “I suppose there is no hope for me, then?”

“Somehow I doubt you’re hurting in that department, Altuğ,” I said. He grinned roguishly, and took Dietrich’s vacated seat. When he spoke, his voice was lower, the over-the-top Turkish accent replaced by the smooth intonation of a native Berliner. 

“You are without a fixer,” he said simply.

“Yeah, unfortunately.”

“Unfortunate indeed. Paul Amsel, may God have mercy on him, was a good man.”

“He was.”

“I cannot replace him, my friend. Nor would I wish to. But I am well connected, in my own right. And I am fond of you and your band of miscreants. I believe you and I could come to an advantageous arrangement.”

I studied him for a moment. “You’re offering to fix for us? Why?”

“Fondness!” he protested. “And…because you have stepped into the role Fräulein Schäfer filled here in the Kreuzbasar admirably. This kiez needs that role filled. Which means you need work. Which means that you need a fixer.”

“Civic duty, then?” I had to smile at that, just a bit. Only in Berlin could one’s civic duty be best accomplished as a middle man for criminals. 

“In a manner of speaking.” He smiled back, then looked askance. “There is a reason I approached you today, though. I had been considering it, but then I received this-” He handed me a PDA with a message pulled up on the screen – “and I was…given impetus.” 

The message lacked an identifying address, and simply instructed him to have me meet a contact at Brandenburg Tor that afternoon. I read it over a few times, then looked up at Altuğ. “Who is this from?”

“As you see, they do not identify themselves.”

“They seem awfully sure you’ll arrange the meet.”

“I…have my suspicions as to its source. And if I am correct, then you do want to meet with this individual.”

I raised an eyebrow. “If we’re gonna work together, you’re going to have to be more forthcoming, Altuğ.”

“I do not want to lead you astray with my speculation,” he said. I leaned back in my chair, studying his face for a long moment.

“Alright. I’ll let you know what comes of it.”

I got on the U-Bahn, heading for Brandenburg Tor. The car was surprisingly crowded, but by the second stop, there were only two people left – me and a man sitting two seats away. He had long silver-white hair that fell past his shoulders and wore an immaculately tailored suit that was either intensely old-fashioned or so cutting edge trendy that I just wasn’t with it enough to recognize it. He looked at me, and I saw that his eyes were golden, like a hawk’s. There was something familiar about them. He lifted one thick eyebrow, and I said, “I take it you were the one who contacted Altuğ Burakgazi?” 

“I am.” His voice was a deep, rich baritone. He managed to make those two words sound like a mini-sonata.

“So what can I do for you, Herr…?”

“Brackhaus. Hans Brackhaus.” He casually tugged at the cuffs of his suit jacket. “I wish to make you and your team an offer of employment.”

“Really.” I studied him. Money, obviously. That was evident in his suit, his shoes, his grooming. He was someone accustomed to giving orders and having them followed. He wielded power. Definitely physical power, very likely magical as well.

“I…represent a powerful individual who takes great interest in you. Tell me, would you have allowed Adrian Vauclair to go through his plan if it had not involved the use of dragon fire?”

I should have been angry. I would have thought that I would be angry. And yet, I was fascinated. Did he know it all, then? APEX, Panacea, everything? Maybe if I answered his question, I might be able to find out. “I don’t think so. Dragons obviously serve some purpose in the world. I mean, Feuerschwinge said she was a guardian.”

“Ah yes. The Lady Firewing.” His expression flickered, though I couldn’t quite identify the emotion that animated it. “Thanks to you, she lives. A pity she is now quite mad.”

“She’s had better days, mentally. But I think she and I understood each other.”

His gaze tightened. “Indeed?” 

Silence reigned for a long moment, the passage of the train the only sound. A minute twitch of his exquisite shoulders, and he continued. “You are correct, of course. Dragon do have a great purpose. Greater than any mortal can understand.” His golden eyes fixed on me. “They must account for centuries in a single thought. What is a human life, in comparison to that?”

Looked like I had a true believer on my hands. I shrugged a little. “It may not be long, but it’s still what we’ve got, isn’t it? Might as well make something of it.”

“An interesting philosophy.”

Silence again. I said, “This offer of employment…I think I’d like to know who’s really making it. I’m sort of done with go-betweens.”

“Of course,” he said. “Your employer will be the Great Dragon Lofwyr. I’m sure you have heard of him.”

I definitely should have been angry then. If the Golden Wyrm was involved, then yes, he did know it all. But instead, my fascination only deepened. Why act through a bunch of shadowrunners? How could have he have possibly controlled for all the variables? There had been so many moving parts, so many pieces. But then, what had Brackhaus just said? That dragons had to account for centuries. I couldn’t stop myself from leaning forward slightly. “Why would we want to work for him?”

“You already have.”

“Oh?”

“The first time you went to Harfeld Manor, you did so at the behest of one Hermann Vauclair, better known as Green Winters. How do you think he obtained the information that sent you there?”

I felt myself grow stiff and still. “So, ultimately, he was our client.”

“In a manner of speaking.”

Everything. He really had known everything. And he’d tugged on Green Winters’ strings, setting off a chain reaction, dominos tipping from Adrian Vauclair’s worshipful younger brother to Monika Schäfer to me. I studied Brackhaus. There really was something familiar about his eyes. Had I seen him somewhere before? What was it about those eyes?

_Will you let me, human?_

Oh shit. Of course.

Not mad and afraid and in pain, but cool and assured and in control.

It was a shot in the dark, but I’m a shadowrunner. That’s what I do for a living.

“Then maybe we should discuss payment, Herr Lofwyr.”

He straightened in his seat, ever so slightly. Was that satisfaction or anger that crossed his face? He steepled his fingers. “What is it that your kind say? Never cut a deal with a dragon?”

“A deal was already made that I was not a party to. I’m just interested in collecting compensation for services rendered.”

Something that might have been a smile pulled at his lips, just for an instant. “Very well. What did you have in mind?”

What _did_ I have in mind? A mountain of numbers, all of them with a sizable number of zeros attached, rose up in my mind. But washing over the nuyen symbols was a flood of memory: Bodies on the cold Kreuzbasar pavement and a pistol, aimed at Audran’s head. I would buy back their safety with his blood, and we had, hadn’t we?

Samuel. Altuğ. Maliit. Laine. Kim. Alexander.

Glory’s impossibly gentle metal hands, and the secrets shared between us. Blitz’s puppy dog face and conciliatory soykaf. Eiger’s grudging smiles and deadpan jokes. Dietrich’s warm eyes and wry grin, the protective circle of his arms and the way he looked at me. The way he lit up when the odds were longest. The way he called everybody ‘love’ and yet it sounded different when he said it to me. The way he cupped my face between his hands to kiss me, thumbs brushing my cheekbones. 

Just…everything about Dietrich, honestly.

Home. An oasis. A haven. A sanctuary. The first place I’d ever belonged.

APEX’s vision of the future.

“The kiez in Kreuzburg called the Kreuzbasar,” I said. 

He actually blinked. I really think I surprised him. I will treasure that memory for the rest of my life.

“Excuse me?”

“I want the Kreuzbasar,” I repeated. “I stopped Adrian Vauclair and I freed Feuerschwinge, and that is the payment I want. I want my kiez, and I want its safety and freedom guaranteed against any threat.”

He peered at me, as if I were some interesting specimen he had never encountered before. Then he shook himself ever so slightly and said, in a careless tone, “Consider it your very own manor. I dub thee Baroness. Does that satisfy you?”

“Yes. I believe that concludes our business.”

“Then I take it your answer to the job offer is no?”

“I’m afraid I don’t do blind contract work. If you have anything specific, you know where to find me. Though I do reserve the right of refusal.”

“Naturally.” The train slowed, and he stood. “I believe we will meet again,” he said. “Until then.”

The doors slid open, and he exited. I watched him cross the platform as they shut again, and it was a good thing I was alone in the carriage, because that was when I started to laugh and I probably sounded like a crazy person.


	17. Der Zuflucht

It was much later, and we were sitting on the roof of Reine Neugier, Dietrich and I, looking out over the Kreuzbasar, wrapped in a blanket he’d grabbed. He was drinking, I was smoking. It was a good night for it.

“The Golden Wyrm himself, huh?” he asked.

“In the flesh,” I replied. “Or at least one version of it.”

“So why even tell you? Why admit that he was involved at all? Other than bragging, anyway.”

“I have some theories, which I’m sure he would never confirm or deny any way. I do think I managed to surprise him, though.”

“Oh?” I told him about my ‘purchase’ of the Kreuzbasar, and his eyebrows lifted. “Baroness? You know dragons don’t throw that kind of talk around lightly, love. He’s gonna consider you an actual authority here.” His lip curled ever so slightly on the A word. “I’m not sure how I feel about that.”

“Look at it this way,” I said. “Now you’re in a position to literally fuck authority.”

He thought about that for a moment, then a slow, evil smile spread across his face. “You’ve got a filthy mind, _Liebchen_. I like it.” I smiled back in kind, and then he cocked his head thoughtfully. “But what’s keeping him from taking that back the second he got off that train?”

“Feuerschwinge,” I said simply.

“What about her? She’s sleepin’ it off incommunicado. No one will see her again in this World. What does that have to do with us?”

“In this Age? Nothing. But as Lofwyr made incredibly clear to me, dragons take the long view. And Feuerschwinge said she would remember us. What happens if he fucks us over, and she finds out? That may be eons in the future, but he’s got to think about that now. So what’s one little piece of Berlin in exchange for keeping a fellow Great Dragon sweet? He may not have to worry in the long run about what happens to a bunch of puny humans, but keeping a mark off his balance sheet with her – that could pay off for him later.”

He shook his head. “Too deep for me, love.”

I exhaled a long plume of smoke. “It’s a gamble, but…I owe this place, Dietrich. These people. If I can buy them some time and space, it’ll be worth it.”

He raised his bottle in salute. “I’ll drink to that.” He did, and we sat in comfortable silence, warmed by each other’s presence. 

“I’m gonna miss Glory,” he said quietly. 

“Me too,” I replied. “But I don’t think she’ll be gone long.”

“So she’s okay?”

“Yeah. Just needs to get some things sorted out.”

He nodded. “That’s good. Gotta admit, she brings out a protective side of me. Dunno why. It’s not like she’s helpless or something.”

“She hasn’t had much protection in her life,” I said. “Maybe that’s why.”

“Maybe so. Sometimes I’ll catch glimpses of her aura…” He took a drink, shaking his head. 

“I can only imagine.”

“It ain’t pretty,” he said. “But it’s been getting better. I think you’ve been good for her.”

“Me?” 

“You’ve been good for a lot of people,” he said, smiling at me. I tried to look like I disapproved of the flattery and failed miserably.

I shifted closer against his side, stubbing out my cigarette. Below us, laughter wafted on the chilly wind, and the silence stretched again. It was nice, I reflected, that we could do that. I leaned my head on his shoulder, and let my eyes close as he kissed my hair.

“I’m thinking about getting a tattoo,” I said finally. “A real one.”

He smiled faintly. “It’ll hurt.” I pulled back, just so he could see that I was making a face at him.

“Dietrich, I’ve been shot before.”

“I’m just saying,” he said, still smiling. “It’ll hurt.” I made another, more elaborate face, and he chuckled. “What of?”

“A hornet,” I said. “So I always remember whose nest I need to aim for.”

Something in his smile changed, and he looked at me thoughtfully, just long enough I was starting to wonder if I had something on my face. Then he said, “You know, I never thought I’d live to see thirty. Until I did. Then I didn’t think I’d live to see forty. Until I did. Now here I am, staring down the barrel of fifty, and for the first time in my life, I’m thinking about the future. And it’s all your fault.”

I blinked at him. “I’m…sorry?”

“I didn’t say it was a bad thing,” he said, still smiling. “Just…a change in perspective.” He shifted, rewrapping the blanket around us. “The night Paul died, you said something I couldn’t get out of my head.”

I peered at him in continued confusion. I certainly didn’t recall any burst of eloquence that night. “What did I say?”

“Right before you fell asleep, you were talking about how the Kreuzbasar felt like home, and then you added, ‘So do you.’ I didn’t get a minute’s sleep that night.”

“Dietrich, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to-”

“Let me finish, _Schatz_ ,” he chastised mildly. “I found myself thinking that if you felt that way about me, then maybe I owed it to you not to be so cavalier with my life.

“But I can’t just sit back on my laurels. There’s gotta be a fight. Always. That’s how I’m wired, and more importantly, it’s how my relationship with the Dragonslayer works. If I give up the fight, what does He need me for? Why bother giving me magic?

“I’ve never tried to negotiate with Him before, so that part was a little scary, but I felt like I’d come up with a pretty good solution. I just needed to be sure He was on board. So I asked Him, ‘Can I fight for her?’”

My breath caught.

“He liked that,” he continued, smiling at the memory. “Liked it a lot. Told you He liked you.”

“Dietrich, I - I don’t know what to say.”

His shoulders rose and fell in a shrug. “What’s to say? I’ve never been afraid to die, and I’m still not, but I have other considerations now. I’m not sure what that means yet, practically speaking, but there ya go.” His eyes caught mine, and I understood then that warmth I’d seen in them the morning I’d found him in the shop. It was there now. It might always be there now.

“I wasn’t just blowing smoke when I said you’re a hell of a woman, Zee,” he continued softly. “You are, and you’ve got me. One hundred percent.”

I swallowed. And he had me. “I’m gonna hold you to that,” I murmured, reaching out to touch his face, my fingers following the line of tattoos that tracked from temple to jawline. “I don’t know exactly what the future holds, but I know it’s gonna be a wild ride.” 

“Nah, that’s you.” He grinned cheekily, and my attempt at a reproving face got overrun by the fact that when he smiles me, I smile back. Can’t help it.

“Now who’s got a filthy mind?”

“Never said I didn’t.” He pressed a quick kiss to my lips, then took a last swig. “Welp, bottle’s empty. Shall we take this inside?” 

“Does this mean I can warm up my cold feet on you?” I asked as he stood.

“Fuck no.”

I stuck out my tongue. “Love you too, asshole.”

He smiled as he held out a hand to help me up. _Love you too_. Yeah, that about summed it up. 

I came to my feet, and for a moment, looked back out over the Kreuzbasar. _Our_ Kreuzbasar. Whatever lay in the future, we would protect this place. You don’t get much in this life, so you hang on to the things that really matter. I would hang on to the people I loved, and I would hold my home, my manor, against any threat. But what Lofwyr didn’t know was that it wasn’t just mine. It belonged to all of us. Our kiez, our streets, our people. Our shadows.

The odds were long, and success was by no means guaranteed, but I’m a shadowrunner. That’s what I do for a living.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! Hope you enjoyed!


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